A serial killer does not select his victims at random. The Santa Barbara murderer, for example, targeted people for clear reasons and killed his own housemates besides.

Killing Anne and later Katherine Howard was not political. It was personal.

A person does not have to be either incompetent or powerless to be innocent. You’re basically arguing that Anne brought down a powerful man, and so she deserved to die or at any rate lost her innocent card. But Wolsey ended her engagement to someone she loved and stood in the way of the Reformation she believed in.

“Ruthless” is a term only applied negatively to men in this culture. Women who earn it supposedly have earned their own deaths as punishment. I disagree.