Historians have delighted in casting Henry VIII as the ultimate one-dimensional Tudor villain almost as much as they have Anne Boleyn, simplistically explaining away his actions as those of a narcissistic pampered prince. They’ve called him a tyrant, a murderer, an obsessive, paranoid, heartless egotist. And he clearly was. Don’t worry, I’m not here to defend him and claim he too has been misrepresented all these years. But his behaviour has been misunderstood.
He harboured all these complexities and more. But what makes such traits manifest so cataclysmically in one person? What makes Henry’s destructive patterns of behaviour, with all those seemingly irrational and evil decisions, slowly evolve his story from one of many brutal tales in history into a psychological evaluation?
The answer is mental illness.
The evidence I am about to present in these pages points unequivocally to Henry VIII being an undiagnosed sociopath.
If at this point your mind automatically veers towards Henry’s infamous jousting accident of 1536, the year the king supposedly ‘changed’ from an easy-going, happy-go-lucky tyrant to a short-tempered one with a limp, then let me stop you right there. We are about to discover that Henry’s issues were so much more deeply ingrained in his psychological make-up than history has ever considered before. So, while I definitely support the school of thought espoused by recent historians that the king’s later accident did indeed affect him, the evidence we will dissect in this book proves that his head injury only served to exacerbate a clearly pre-existing, lifelong mental illness: one we can trace right back to its development in childhood and its grave effect on the people in his life, not months before Anne’s death in 1536 but decades.
Which means Henry’s entire relationship with Anne Boleyn suddenly goes from the world’s most unconvincing love story to the chilling case study of a sociopath.
The key element of looking at the king’s actions through the eyes of his mental illness is that it not only sheds brand-new light on his own life, but affects how we interpret Anne Boleyn’s story in the most catastrophic way. It means she didn’t have to have done anything drastic to cause his affections to wane; she didn’t have to have been an impassioned wife on the warpath, throwing tantrums that caused him to tire of her – just some of the feeble explanations history has mustered so far.
It’s human nature that when a break-up happens, we feel we have to lay the blame on someone in order for it to make sense, and the standard go-to with Henry and Anne seems to be: what did she do to make him want to get rid of her so desperately? Yes, it would appear society’s favourite habit of blaming the woman was just as prevalent in the sixteenth century as it sadly still is today. But what if Anne didn’t change or become tiresome? What if he was the one who suddenly switched? What if Henry’s affections could do a 360 and turn to hatred without a justified cause and, more importantly, without a conscience?
The frustrating thing is that almost everyone has been quick to call Henry a psycho, dismissing it as a no-brainer while throwing around words such as mad and insane. But no one has ever stopped to apply the key traits of these mental illnesses to the king’s notorious actions. Instead, for centuries, historians have continued to attempt to understand rationally how his relationship with Anne Boleyn unfolded the way it did, either brushing over the illogical sequence of events without striving for a more convincing explanation, or blaming other people, concocting theories based on the actions of those around him – namely Anne Boleyn – that this is what must have triggered him to . . . (insert irrational action here).
But the vital point to understand about sociopathy is that there is no rationale. If Henry genuinely had this debilitating mental disorder – which world-leading psychologists suggest in this chapter that he did – his actions can’t be explained away logically or dissected as for a rational person. So, in order to fully understand Anne Boleyn’s story, we must look at her entire relationship through the prism of Henry’s mental illness.
But first, know this: to speak of mental illness is not an insult, and as a society we need to move beyond that stigmatised belief. It is simply an illness of the mind, in exactly the same way that a tumour might grow in the brain. But unlike a tumour it is harder to detect, easier to dismiss and it cannot be cut out. Those living with this condition are chained to their own destructive behaviour until the bitter end.
The first thing you need to understand about a sociopath is that they have no conscience. As though someone flicked the switch on this part of their brain, giving them the emotional freedom to do whatever the hell they want, without that irritating voice of reason ruining all the fun. This means a sociopath is able to hurt those they supposedly love without a hint of guilt or a morsel of regret. It’s almost incomprehensible to us that a person could never experience guilt, yet this we shall unfathomably witness, time and time again, in the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It’s not a case of the king’s stubborn reluctance to experience true emotions; a sociopath’s brain simply does not possess the capacity to process them. It is science, not logic. It’s the kid who tortures animals without feeling bad. It’s the person who doesn’t lose sleep over getting a co-worker fired and taking their job. It’s the king who can order the brutal death of the love of his life and get engaged to someone else the very next day. It’s as liberating a prospect as it is a horrifying one.
So why sociopath and not psychopath?
Some psychologists say the distinction between the two is so minuscule they really should come under the same category, while others disagree, seeing them as worlds apart. But there are some key differences between the two that I believe place Henry VIII firmly in the sociopath category.
While they both display deceitful and manipulative behaviour, psychopaths are fearless, but sociopaths aren’t. Now, while fear is an emotion, Dr Kevin Dutton PhD, a research psychologist at Oxford University, explains, ‘There is a lot of cutting-edge, scientific evidence to show that sociopaths can actually experience fear if you draw their attention to something they should be frightened of.’ So, whereas you and I might be scared of something that could cost us our lives in the pursuit of a goal, even if there is danger all around them a sociopath will not pay attention to it. But when grave danger is pointed out, this is where recent laboratory studies have found that sociopaths can experience that most debilitating of human emotions: true fear.96
This makes obvious sense as the majority of Henry’s most shocking actions were most definitely driven by fear. The fear of God; fear of losing the throne – after all, it was only his father, Henry VII, who defeated King Richard III in battle and took the crown. So, it was an inbuilt family fear throughout the Tudors’ reign that there would be an uprising and the throne would be taken back by a more rightful heir.
Henry also displayed an excessive fear of illness and death. You name it, Henry harboured an irrational fear of it. It’s what made him so chilled and fun to be around.
Another difference is that psychopaths can’t form attachments with others, whereas sociopaths can – even if they are pretty dysfunctional, as we’ll see when we go on to dissect Henry’s particular relationship with Anne Boleyn. Sociopaths see the object of their desire as just that: an ‘object’ they must win, not a person for whom they have developed deep emotions.
It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Henry’s story that sociopaths are less emotionally stable than psychopaths. Where a psychopath can plan every last detail of a murder with a chilling sense of calm, sociopaths are highly impulsive and display erratic behaviour – like, say, ordering the murder of their wife within a matter of days after deciding they should break up. They lack patience. Act on compulsion. All sounding a little familiar?
Of course, one of the main differences between psychopaths and sociopaths is how the mental illness develops, and that’s what they call nature versus nurture. Whereas psychopaths are born (nature), sociopathy can be due to childhood trauma such as abuse or neglect (nurture), or as previously mentioned, it can be the result of a brain injury.
But as we will discover, there is simply no getting away from the fact that Henry was at the mercy of his sociopathy during his entire relationship with Anne Boleyn; we see it in everything from his relentless, obsessive pursuit of her to the nonchalance with which he murdered her. Which means his mental illness could only have been the result of his disturbing youth.
Now, Henry’s childhood is rarely delved into in great detail in the history books, as though this super-villain just materialised one day, morbidly obese, handing out death sentences from the throne. Yet Henry’s mental illness was due to more than having grown up around a chorus of ‘yes-men’. He experienced a deeply traumatic and isolated childhood, not to mention a dysfunctional relationship with his father, which was to have a profound effect upon his entire reign.
But this is where we have to agree that suffering is relative; while some may never know extreme poverty and the true horrors and abuses we hear of around the world, it doesn’t mean that in their eyes, in their unique set of circumstances, life can’t be their version of traumatic, and hence still have the same psychological impact. Mental illness does not discriminate. It can hit paupers and princes and be equally devastating. Of course, it’s very easy to avoid giving too much significance to this part of the king’s story, as there weren’t too many well-balanced and functional childhoods in the sixteenth century. But the fact that there appears to have been an above average level of crazy in Tudor history should perhaps tell us it shouldn’t be so lightly dismissed.
One of the king’s biographers, John Matusiak, tells of how during these formative childhood years, from birth until the age of seven, those who surrounded Henry were passive figures, attending and providing at a distance rather than interacting and comforting as loving parental figures. Only weeks after his birth, Henry was taken away from his mother and father at Greenwich to live at Eltham Palace in Kent.97 Here he was raised by his grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort, who by all accounts was an incredibly intense woman. A devout Catholic, she took a vow of chastity at the age of sixty-one. She would wake at 5 a.m. every day to begin her prayers, and would wear a hair shirt. John Fisher described her as being continuously gripped with anxiety, in tears over past miseries and bemoaning what doom was to come.98
It was a belief of the time that around the age of seven, high-born boys should be ‘taken from the company of all women’, and Henry was henceforth taught exclusively by male tutors.99 Until 1502, the main tutor was John Skelton, a man for whom biographers show a near-universal disdain due to his scathing sexist attacks on women, which once compelled an incensed little lady to send him the head of a dead man. Most worryingly, this occurred while he was living with the tender Prince Henry at Eltham.100
Throughout Henry’s early childhood, his father’s health deteriorated and the old king became increasingly bad-tempered, nasty and violent towards everyone he dealt with, including young Henry, who it’s reported he attacked after his son apparently drove him into an almost trance-like pathological rage. The Spanish ambassador Fuensalida even told of how Henry’s father once attacked him so violently it was ‘as if to kill him’.101
So, not disturbing in the slightest that these should be the people who were raising the future king of England and Anne Boleyn’s future husband. Not that Henry had always been the future king. In fact, for the first ten years of his life he grew up in the shadow of his older brother and original heir to the throne, Prince Arthur. But when Arthur died unexpectedly in 1502, their father became paranoid that ten-year-old Henry, who was now sole heir to the Tudor throne, would also die, exposing the kingdom to attack. So, he effectively locked his son away from all risk of physical harm and deadly diseases that had a nasty habit of snatching youngsters away all too soon. But as Matusiak rightly points out, animals raised in captivity aren’t the most functional.
By the time Henry was thirteen, his father refused to let him take his place, like his brother before him, as prince of Wales at Ludlow Castle, instead keeping him locked within the safety of his own Palace of Westminster.102 Again Fuensalida, who came to the Tudor court in 1508, described a disturbing scene: at seventeen, Henry was ‘locked away as a woman’ in a bedchamber just off from his father’s that was only accessible via a private door.103 Even though the young prince was said to have held his own miniature court, he never spoke in public, except to answer a question asked by his father,104 and he was surrounded at all times by trusted attendants whose permission Henry needed to move anywhere within the palace walls.
While J. J. Scarisbrick, one of Henry VIII’s most prominent biographers, backs up the reports that young Henry was raised in near isolation,105 David Loades raises the obvious question as to how isolated he could really have been in the ‘crowded environment’ of the Tudor court. Indeed, Fuensalida was also to report Henry spending many a day jousting in the tiltyard at Richmond. Granted, he was watched closely by his father,106 and Loades concedes that these were ‘strictly private’ activities in which Henry would probably joust or play tennis with only his instructor for company. It was said to be out of the question for the young prince ever to demonstrate his sporting skills to the rest of the court, and he went on to show his great upset at being excluded from the court’s many summer activities.107
Alas, you see, the young Henry didn’t need to be in solitary confinement every day of his childhood for the worrying lifestyle uncovered by historians to have had the damaging effect it clearly did on his psyche.
But what about the childhood friends we’re told he was close to? We’ve already met the old rogue that was Charles Brandon. The king was also known to be close to a certain Henry Norris from a young age. So, can a sociopath have true friends?
No, not really. But ‘friends’ is a term we have labelled them with. Though Brandon came to be considered Henry’s ‘favourite’ courtier,108 accounts describe him more as a loyal apprentice who stayed close and obeyed his every demand. The fact that Brandon would turn to Henry’s minister Wolsey for help in manipulating the king speaks more of him being a servant and court jester than a true friend.109 Which would explain how, as with his treatment of Anne Boleyn, Henry was able, decades later, to banish Brandon from court and sentence Norris to death without so much as a second thought for his lifelong companions.
Back in 1503, Henry hardly had time to digest his brother’s death and the enormity of his new future before he was hit with another, more devastating blow the following year when his mother, Elizabeth of York, died. Henry’s mother was the daughter of Edward IV and the sister of the tragic princes who were presumed to have been murdered in the Tower of London by Richard III.110 Although Henry spent much of his time away from his mother, this only served to elevate her to an untouchable, legendary status, and he was later to describe the death of ‘my dearest mother’ as ‘hateful’.111
When you consider, then, that only six months later Henry’s thirteen-year-old sister, Margaret Tudor, was shipped off to Scotland to marry the thirty-three-year-old King James IV, you get a real sense of every comfort being snatched away from him.
It’s said that following Elizabeth’s death the court lost all its fun, and by all accounts became a miserable place to live and work in. Henry’s father refused to let him take part in official royal celebrations or festivities during the years leading up to his reign. You would have thought it might have been a good idea to prepare the future king, as he had done Arthur, but no. Henry never sat in on government proceedings, nor attended council meetings.112 Matusiak confirms he was ‘entirely untutored in the art of kingsmanship’.113
Then, when Henry was seventeen, his father died and he was thrust into the international spotlight, crowned king of England and handed all the power in the land.
Is there any wonder what happened next?
People have called Henry a narcissist, which is a mental disorder in itself but can also be one of the components of a sociopathic personality. Dr Kevin Dutton, author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, explains that, just as a triathlon can feature various sporting events yet each one can stand in its own right, so too can narcissism be a symptom of sociopathy and also be a disorder on its own.
However, Dutton interestingly points out that sociopaths like to be the centre of attention because it gives them power which, in turn, enables them to pull the strings and manipulate other people. Something we can very much apply to Henry VIII and his life at court. So, for a sociopath, being the centre of attention is a means to an end, whereas for a person suffering from narcissistic disorder alone, being the centre of attention is the end goal. It fulfils a need for them to feel they are somebody, and Henry definitely wanted more than mere adulation. He wanted to get his own way.
Within weeks of his father’s death, Henry married his late brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, rescuing her from regal obscurity and placing her back on the throne that she had left her homeland of Spain for. And although Henry’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, the woman who raised him from birth, died only days later on 29 June, her passing did not dampen the summer-long celebrations to mark his new role as king.114 There were feasts, jousts, hunting and the odd beheading.
Ah yes, some of the first executions eighteen-year-old Henry ordered were those of Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, who’d helped his father amass the Tudors’ vast fortune via an incredibly unpopular taxation and fine collection. As Henry’s narcissism kicked in, and with it the desperation to gain public approval, on only the second day of his reign he concocted charges of treason and had the two men thrown in the Tower of London to await their execution.115
Just like that. Baby’s First Murders ordered, seemingly without a flicker of guilt or remorse.116 A sociopath was born, and long before his world was to collide with Anne Boleyn’s.
Bizarrely, though, it has been argued that before his 1536 head injury, Henry was not the tyrant we have firm evidence of him being. This claim is based on reports by the king’s tutors, ambassadors and contemporary chroniclers of his ‘goodly personage’, ‘gentile friendliness’, ‘grace of nature’ and ‘how wisely he behaves’, such that he has ‘few equals in the world’.117 But this fawning flattery was standard. We have to remember these people were speaking publicly about the king of England. What do we historians expect? His subjects to be giving a brutally honest critique of the monarch? Who on earth would risk their life to speak ill of Henry VIII?
Unfortunately, the erratic actions and behaviour we will come to witness from the king throughout this book clearly demonstrate that he suffered from a mental illness long before his horrifying decision to kill Anne Boleyn in 1536.
Alas, once you realise who Anne was dealing with I’m afraid it will change the way you view their ‘romance’ forever. However, now you understand the core components of Henry’s psyche, we can begin to dissect the real reason that drove him to leave Katherine of Aragon. For it was not the simplistic quest for a son and heir, nor the passionate pursuit of his ‘love’ for Anne Boleyn. This is where the history books get it so wrong: not so much barking up the wrong tree as being in the wrong forest entirely.
Everyone has images of Henry VIII being this strong force of nature, and that was no accident. Everything about him was sending a signal to the world that he was a stronghold fortified tower of strength who was not to be messed with – from the power stance in his official portraits, with the unnaturally broad shoulders and those calf muscles, to the many public displays of macho bravado (jousting, wrestling, war; my country’s stronger than yours). But this exterior was merely a carefully stage-managed cover for the worries and fears eating away at him on the inside. Henry was a tortured soul who feared everything, yet nothing ate away at him more than his fear of God’s wrath.
It’s no secret that he believed he was personally chosen by God to be the king of England; for this reason, he felt himself closer to the Almighty than everyone else. So he took it as a sign of the Lord’s ardent displeasure when he failed to produce a son and heir to his hallowed throne with Katherine of Aragon. Although Henry was aware of the potential issues in marrying his brother’s widow from the start, it wasn’t until God made his anger known concerning the distinct lack of sons that he began to take it seriously. By the time a passage in the Book of Leviticus was brought to his attention, he knew he was in trouble. He obsessed over the scripture that stated in no uncertain terms: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife; it is thy brother’s nakedness. And if a man should take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing: they shall be childless.’ Incidentally, this was deemed to apply only to male children because, lest we forget, Henry had a daughter by Katherine of Aragon, Princess Mary.
When it became clear that the queen was past childbearing age and they’d run out of chances for God to forgive them and bless their marriage with a son, the king was hell-bent on correcting his mistake and annulling the offending marriage to avoid the eternal damnation of his soul.
You see, the problem as Henry saw it wasn’t that he couldn’t have a son; his famous affair with Bessie Blount had given him an illegitimate son, whom he openly recognised as his own. The issue was that he couldn’t have a son with Katherine.
And why not? Because she was his brother’s widow – I mean, keep up, old boy!
Of course, there were many at the time who were sceptical about the king’s argument, as most continue to be today. Particularly when there was additional scripture in Deuteronomy that seemingly contradicted Leviticus, stating, ‘When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother.’118
But what we need to remember is that the text we are reading here is an English translation, and that Leviticus used the words frater germanus, which meant ‘brother’ in the true sense, whereas Deuteronomy used the word cognatus, meaning ‘relative’.119 It was this attention to detail that kept Henry VIII consumed with the fear that he had gone against God’s word and needed to correct his sin. In fact, at the time of Henry’s marrying Katherine, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham had been explicitly against their union for the very same scriptural reasons.120
So, while it may have been repeatedly sold to us as Henry VIII divorced Katherine and broke from Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn while citing Leviticus as the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, that doesn’t actually appear to be the case. In fact, we have evidence that Henry was making secret enquiries about divorce long before he had the end goal of marrying Anne.
Wolsey’s gentleman usher, George Cavendish, tells us his master went to France to meet Queen Claude’s sister, Lady Renée, who was set to inherit the duchy of Brittany, as a possible new bride for the king.121 At the same time, Wolsey was being instructed to find out about the possibility of an annulment. Then we have reports from the bishop of Lincoln, John Longland, who said in 1532 that he heard mutterings of the divorce ‘nine or ten years ago’, which dates the king’s enquiries to as early as 1522 or 1523122 – years before he was involved with Anne.
What this tells us is that something other than his lust for another woman was driving the king to divorce Katherine of Aragon.
Yet most still don’t believe that Henry’s fear of Leviticus was his genuine motivation.
Indeed, it’s easy to interpret the king’s pursuit of a male heir on a very superficial level, with many presuming his growing obsession to be no more than a legendary ego trying to correct his apparent ‘failure as a man’ to secure the crown and kingdom. While this may be a valid argument in the context of Henry’s unique situation as king, and may very well have been how it all started, it becomes increasingly clear that when paired with his deteriorating mental health, the lack of a son soon took on a more ominous meaning for him.
The idea that Henry’s quest for a male heir was driven by a fear of God’s wrath rather than good old Tudor misogyny is further supported by the fact that it doesn’t appear he was all too intimidated by the concept of a woman ruling England. This was first demonstrated when he left Katherine of Aragon to rule the kingdom in his absence in 1513, while he went away to war in France. He proclaimed her governor of the realm and captain-general of the forces,123 during which time the English army defeated the Scots at Flodden.124 But Katherine’s victory clearly didn’t emasculate the proud king to the extent some historians claim, because he later went on to decree in the 1535 Act of Succession that in the event of his own death, Anne Boleyn, not his legitimate children, would rule the country as sole queen regent. This was Henry VIII once again granting a woman equal rights, not just as a man but as a king. It doesn’t get any bigger than that when trying to understand his stance on female rulers.
If Henry was opposed to the idea of a female heir for purely misogynistic reasons, he could have easily done some fancy footwork to ensure the crown went to another, albeit obscure relative, as many a monarch has done before and since. Case in point: there was serious talk at one time of him making his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, his legal heir. He was the king of England; he could do what he wanted, as the Reformation proved. But vitally in this case he didn’t, showing that he wanted that male heir born to confirm God had not forsaken him.
And so it was in the midst of this mental trauma, when he was at his most fraught and desperate, that the king’s mind zeroed in on Anne Boleyn at court in 1526. What we perceive to have started out as a harmless light-hearted flirtation quickly spiralled into a devastating series of events that would change the course of not only Anne’s life but British history.
But how do we know he didn’t really love her?
Aside from the fact that he ordered a swordsman to decapitate her, I turned to neuroscientist Dr James Fallon for an explanation. Here, Fallon draws our attention to another disorder in Henry’s sociopathic triathlon: borderline personality disorder.
People with this condition experience mood swings, and tend to view the world in extremes: a person will drastically become all good or all bad, with no reasonable middle ground. This causes their opinions of others to change quickly and without warning, meaning an individual who is seen as a friend one day can be considered an enemy or traitor the next.125
This is the Henry we recognise.
Dr Fallon’s description of borderline personality disorder could almost be describing Henry’s entire relationship with Anne Boleyn when he explains: ‘Sufferers will idealise someone. They will become the most wonderful person they ever met. But inevitably, for any unpredictable reason, they will get disappointed, at which point they will devalue and then discard them.’126
It is this pattern of intense and unstable relationships, often swinging from extreme love (the idealisation phase) to extreme dislike (the devaluation/discard phase), that Henry VIII repeated time and time again with every single wife he took, but most importantly in his relationship with Anne Boleyn.127
And so, at last, ‘idealise, devalue, discard’ fills in the blanks and explains so many of the king’s inexplicable actions within his relationship with Anne. In the ‘idealise’ phase, Anne became the target of Henry’s game, in which he charmed, flattered and manipulated his way into winning her affections, single-mindedly pursuing her until she was his. But the thing you have to understand about sociopaths is that they are the world’s most convincing method actors, who mimic the emotions they lack, meaning Henry might possibly have been the most charming person Anne Boleyn ever met. Over the years, he would have subconsciously absorbed how others acted in the pursuit of love. This means he wrote her the ‘love letters’, he sent her the gifts, he said all the right things in order to be the person he thought Anne wanted him to be.
However, the one thing she really needed him to be was single, so that’s where his love-bombing essentially failed and he resorted to offering her marriage. But because Henry didn’t have the emotional capacity to love Anne, he instead objectified her, meaning she was never the love of his life but an object of his desire, with emphasis on the word object.
‘Idealise’ does not refer to him idealising Anne as a human being, but as the glory of a prize to be won and owned. And idealise he certainly did. Henry held Anne up as the potential saviour of his kingdom and soul, deciding that she alone could provide him with God’s good favour in the form of that all-hallowed male heir he had so far been denied.
So . . . no pressure, then.
But the problem with Henry idealising Anne as an object is that this apparent ‘emotion’ was only superficial, and could vanish as quickly as it came.
One thing history has struggled to understand in the whole Henry and Anne saga is the speed with which Henry not only lost interest in his new wife once they got married, but just how quickly his supposed love turned to loathing. This has been explained away in the past with quips that Henry discovered Anne to be too skilled in the bedroom to have been a virgin, and that she must have been corrupted in France.128 But as we’ve already seen, that doesn’t appear to ring true for the devout evangelical. More to the point, if those were Henry’s true suspicions upon sleeping with Anne, why would he then go on to marry her one month later? As we will see when we discuss the dubious timing of their eventual marriage.
Easily dismissed, too, is the theory that after seven years together, Anne’s fiery personality suddenly became just too much to deal with the moment they said, ‘I do.’
Altogether pathetic suggestions that sound increasingly like excuses for why a man should want to kill his wife.
The problem here, I believe, is that we’ve been focusing on the wrong part of the relationship’s timeline. We’ve been trying to figure out what went wrong later on – and, granted, plenty did; but in terms of their ‘undying love’ for one another, we need to realise it was never right to begin with. Only when we accept this do we realise how it could implode so spectacularly when it did, and at such breakneck speed.
And so it appears it was that same erratic, God-fearing angst that had driven Henry to divorce Katherine of Aragon that shocked him out of his blind obsession with Anne, bringing all his irrational fears of God’s displeasure back to the surface and triggering the next devastating phase of ‘devalue’.
One of the few emotional states a sociopath is capable of is contempt. As Anne became more human in the eyes of the king, failing to live up to the unobtainable ideals he held her to – namely, her ability to dictate the sex of their firstborn – so his valuation of her fell. In time, his obsession would turn to loathing, but the key thing we have to realise here is that Henry would blame Anne for his own disenchantment. It wasn’t his fault his affection was waning. It wasn’t his fault he no longer found her riveting. It wasn’t his fault he wanted to kill her. It was Anne’s.
Henry’s sociopathy suddenly rendered him indifferent to his wife and partner of ten years; meaning that when someone said she was better off dead, he was able to turn away, move on and never look back with an unnerving ease we struggle to accept to this day.
We all know the harm that was about to befall Anne Boleyn in the final and fatal ‘discard’ phase; however, now we understand why the king had no little voice within telling him not to do it, for he had no conscience.
Disturbingly, you can chart Henry’s pattern of ‘idealise, devalue and discard’ through all his marriages, apart from the two times natural death got in the way (his third wife, Jane Seymour’s, and his own.)129 But interestingly, this pattern was also repeated in some of the closest working relationships he had with the men who helped make him.
Yes, unfortunately for the courtiers and politicians of the Tudor court, Henry’s relationship with Anne Boleyn is just one of many examples during the king’s reign in which a diagnosis of sociopathy provides an explanation for his dreadful actions.
Alas, this is the Tudors’ most baffling relationship explained through the chilling kaleidoscope of Henry VIII’s mental illness. Now we are ready to dissect how things unfolded from Anne Boleyn’s viewpoint – and, as you’re about to see, it’s not at all as you’ve been led to believe . . .
