Anne Boleyn is one of the most important characters in my book Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History, and she’s the queen my audiences vote most often when I have a poll of their favourites, with a forest of arms shooting into the air.
In this video I try to work out why.
Every year, on 19th May, an anonymous delivery arrives at the Tower of London, and it’s always for the same woman.
She was beheaded there on that date in 1536, on the orders of a man who had once written her love letters so steamy that one of them was judged too rude for television.
Along the way I tell the story of a knight’s daughter who spent the best part of seven years at the French court, came home to serve Catherine of Aragon, and then did the one thing nobody ever did to Henry VIII.
She said no.
You’ll hear about the love letters I went to the Vatican to read (and what Tudor “dukkys” were), the break with Rome, and the night before her coronation that Anne spent in the Tower’s royal apartments, the very r…
