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When AB mega-stans are like “Anne would have never been Henry’s mistress because she had too much self-respect” my eye twitches a lil bit. 

Because the implication there is basically that Bessie Blount, Mary Boleyn, et. al any woman that ever did become a king’s mistress didn’t respect themselves and I….hm…….don’t like that. 

Also it’s weirdly…kind of like Starkey’s take? If you replace ‘self-respect’ (and take away his implication that she was essentially playing hard-to-get) with ‘ambition’, in his documentary ep about her he was basically like “OBVIOUSLY Anne was witholding sex up until Calais because Henry would have never bothered to write/send ANY of these letters if she wasn’t…and probably wouldn’t have stayed betrothed to her…it was her chastity that attracted him, etc.”

(In other things Starkey has been like “Henry was not a man driven solely by libido” and then I’ll remember the above and be like so what is the truth, mustard-colored-suit wearing man??)

Idk, I don’t base my admiration on someone based on whether or not they had premarital sex? I find it kind of weird when people are like “she abstained and that was a BALLER MOVE, WE STAN” like uh…aight then. Denotes a weird preoccupation with “purity” that I’m not overly fond of. I think some of it is in response to like, the one-dimensional portrayal of her as Sultry Temptess and nothing else, or the slander and alleged ‘promiscuity’ voiced to smear her name during her trial, but if that’s your focus (She Never Would Have Because She Had R-E-S-P-E-C -T) you’re still…defining her by sex so it’s not great? (i.e. just by an absence of sex vs. by sex alone).

(Remembering a take that referred to her ‘witholding bomb p*ssy–> her p*ssy caused the Reformation’ like… incredibly reductive doesn’t even seem to cover it but that’s kind of what I’m referring to with the ‘baller’ thing). 

Anyway…additionally we don’t actually know whether they consummated their relationship in any way before this date, it could have been either? There’s evidence that supports both possibles, and it could’ve fallen on a spectrum of anywhere in between.

Like, sure… Elizabeth Howard chaperoned their meetings sometimes (but like that would be the first time a couple shirked a chaperone, lol). Anne also had her own private lodgings as early as 1528, and I don’t think her mom accompanied them on their hunting trips.

I’m not definitively saying they did either, I’m just saying we don’t really know which it was. 

I wasn’t like, floating with ye olde popcorn outside their bedroom window pre-marriage so…I can’t really say I know one way or the other.