Henry had been conducting an affair with Mary Boleyn, lady-in-waiting to his wife Catherine of Aragon There has been speculation that Mary's two children, Catherine and Henry Carey, were fathered by Henry, but this has never been proved and the King never acknowledged them as he did Henry FitzRoy, his six-year-old son by his former mistress, Elizabeth Blount.
As Henry in 1525 grows more impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the male heir he desires, he becomes enamored of Mary's sister, Anne, a charismatic young woman of twenty-five in the Queen's entourage.
Anne, however, resists his attempts to seduce her, and refuses to become his mistress as her sister Mary Boleyn had.
It is in this context that Henry considers his three options for finding a dynastic successor and hence resolving what will come to be described at court as the King's "great matter".
These options are legitimizing Henry FitzRoy, which would take the intervention of the pope and would be open to challenge; marrying off Mary as soon as possible and hoping for a grandson to inherit directly, but Mary is considered unlikely to conceive before Henry's death; or somehow rejecting Catherine and marrying someone else of childbearing age.
Probably seeing the possibility of marrying Anne, the third is ultimately the most attractive possibility to the thirty-four-year-old Henry, and it soon becomes the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to the now forty-year-old Catherine.
It is a decision that will see Henry reject papal authority and initiate the English Reformation.
