May 1536, Henry hopes Anne Boleyn’s beheading and marriage annulment will allow an anti-French alliance with the emperor. Eager for a ‘renaissance’, Henry can’t even await the arrival of the reputed executioner from Calais to ‘ask’ Jane’s father John Seymour for her hand. She asks him to reinstate princess Mary as heir. Charles Brandon enjoys fatherhood and tells Thomas Boleyn he may leave court, stripped of everything. Anne confesses haughtily but dies graciously.

Jane Seymour’s brother, Edward, is appointed a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Anne believes she can still marry off Elizabeth to France and repel the Seymours, but Cromwell is only following Royal orders to get rid of the Boleyns and switch to the imperial side, as her father Thomas senses. They believe to have triumphed when Henry refuses Chapuys’s discrete alliance offer, but Cromwell tortures musician Mark Smeaton into a false confession of adultery with Anne. Brereton confesses to ensure the Queen’s death, Sir Henry Norris and her own brother George Boleyn are equally found guilty and precede her beheading, only Thomas Wyatt is -wrongly- acquitted.

The Seymour family hopes Henry’s favor may make Jane queen instead of Anne. Pope Paul III excommunicates apostate England and urges pious French king Francis I to invade it. Now Katherine is dead, rumored poisoned, the emperor offers to accept another queen provided Mary is declared the legal heiress. Henry’s new love inspires him to enter a joust carrying Jane’s color, to the Boleyns’ horror, but he is badly wounded. Cromwell prepares for Elisabeth’s succession, with grandpa Thomas as regent, but Henry recovers. Anne scolds Henry when she finds Jane on his knee, but looses another child. Henry and Cromwell now consider her an obstacle.

While the Pope still hopes that tide will turn Henry’s England back to Rome’s fold, Cromwell and Cranmer use a catalog of real, exaggerated and invented clerical abuses to close all religious houses and confiscate their immense wealth for Henry’s treasury. The Boleyn family worries Anne’s position is perilous without a son, but waits for Katherine’ illness to prove fatal. Henry is prepared to ally himself with the emperor despite Anne. Hunting with duke Charles, Henry meets fellow France veteran John Seymour’s enchanting daughter Jane.

Cromwell convinces Henry the religious houses’ immorality justifies spoliation, which even finances plays to show the people the papist ‘debauchery’. Henry wants the French king’s junior son to marry Anne’s daughter Elisabeth. The French envoy, an admiral entertained by duke Charles Brandon, proposes, rather then legitimize the royal son, the dauphin to wed Katherine’s daughter Mary- or the emperor’s. Charles tells Chapuys he believes Anne is a witch. After More’s ghost haunts Henry, Anne further looses openly unfaithful Henry’s favor.

Efforts to legalize the Henry’s marriage and further advance his authority and power come to steadfast obstructions. Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher demand that only God can govern the church. Arrested and confined to the Tower of London, both men are confronted with charges of high treason and a possible beheading unless they receive the Oath of Allegiance. In the mean time, Henry’s adventurous eye endures to stray.

After princess Elisabeth’s baptism, Henry orders Thomas Cromwell to draw up a bill of succession favoring his and Ann’s offspring, to be accepted by an oath from all subjects. The affront to the imperialist party is maximized by making princess Mary a lowly lady in waiting to her half-sister, yet the French King still refuses openly to recognize the new Queen. Ann orders her rival lady Eleanor Luke eliminated, by false charges of jewel theft. Tired of Henry’s schismatic obstinacy, Pope Paul III makes the loyal, hence jailed bishop Fisher a cardinal, Henry orders his beheading. Thomas More can no longer support his entire family, yet answers Cromwell’s questions with Henry’s own pamphlet arguing for papal supremacy by divine right. At her father George Boleyn’s suggestion only an ambitious mistress is a problematic rival, Ann urges Margaret ‘Madge’ Sheldon to ‘succeed’ Eleanor. Thomas More refuses to take the oath as phrased, while accepting he succession, landing him in the Tower.

Henry destroys all ties with authority and the past. After many failed attempts to have his marriage to Katherine annulled by the Catholic Church, Henry’s patience finally wears out and he marries Anne in secret, appoints his Lutheran chaplain Thomas Cranmer the head of the Church of England, and strips Katherine of her title and status of Queen. The king and new queen are disappointed that their first child is a girl, whom they christen Elizabeth.

Having sent Cromwell to Germany to find out about the Lutheran church, Henry, realizing that he will not get a divorce from the Papacy ,cuts off all ties with Rome and declares himself to be the head of the church in England. Katherine is banished as Anne is made the Marquess of Pembroke. Despite Brandon’s opinion that she may not be a virgin, Henry is besotted with her and journeys with her to France to announce that she is to be the next queen of England.

As he seeks the annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII appoints himself the head of the Church of England. And Anne Boleyn insists that Henry remove Queen Katherine from the picture — and Court.