An Instinctive Politician.
It had taken the King a month to dispose of a wife on a charge of treason, sweep some of her friends to the block with her, bastardise her child, and acquire a new queen.
Here was the power of the Tudor monarchy in action, with the King bending his Council, the Church, and the law to do his will.
But the fall of Anne Boleyn was not quite what it seemed, and Henry was almost as much a victim of events as was his former queen. Perhaps a man nervous of his own virility was made to believe his wife had mocked him with other men.
In the end the fate of Elizabeth’s mother showed the vulnerability, as well as the power of the Tudor monarchy. Factional manipulation of the King destroyed Anne Boleyn, as those about Henry had the opportunity to manage him.
Elizabeth was said to have gloried in her father, but she was certainly not ashamed of her mother, and as queen her own symbol of the phoenix may have signified her recovery. She had to learn, and fast that a woman in politics was at risk from emotional entanglements, and that a ruler of England could be made the tool of Court intrigues. Thus it was a case of being faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself and thus make yourself indispensable.
The fortune of royal wives was not impressive: her mother and stepmother were executed for alleged adultery and treason, two stepmothers died in childbirth, and a German stepmother was married for diplomatic convenience and divorced for lack of interest.
But the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives and in the years that followed, Elizabeth rose from bastard child of an adulterous traitress to Queen of England. She was indeed a political phoenix and instinctive politician.