The Gathering Storm: The Forces Roiling the World of Anne Boleyn

By

Howard Bloom

[Chapter 34 in Howard Bloom’s upcoming 2023 book The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong.]

What was the role of sex in the romance of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIIIth? Did their courtship do what Pierre Louis de Maupertuis decrees — finding the shortest distance between two points? Or did it do something far more ambitious? Did it create the longest distance between two points? Did it harness the hurricanes of history? Or, to put it differently, is the story of Anne and Henry simple and thrifty or expensive and complex? You be the judge.

When Anne Boleyn was sixteen, Europe was in turmoil. Religious turmoil. A church run in Rome had held Europe in a headlock since 323 ad, when the Roman Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity. Romans who believed in Jupiter, Juno, and Mars had called the head of their pagan College of Priests the “Pontifex Maximus.” The newly-Christian emperor took that pagan title for himself, thus declaring himself head of the Christian religion. Over 1,200 years later, when the Renaissance sparked a fascination with ancient Roman history, popes would resurrect that pagan title — Pontifex Maximus — and give it to themselves. And they would give themselves the power the title implied…