I think Catherine of Aragon had delivered him a son who lived he would have remained married to her and simply had his affairs.
LOL, touchy touchy. It's my theory, BTW, and if you're talking about validation, making a birth mother queen is, yes, a powerful form of validation for her child. As for books, what my wife had pointed out many times is that the emphasis of their contents varies according to almost factional intensity and political and religious divisions, to this day.