Anne Boleyn's Book of Hours by Judith Allnatt

 On 19th May this year I visited Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn's childhood home. It was on this day in 1536 that Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London following charges of adultery, incest and plotting to kill her husband, Henry VIII. Modern historians regard these charges as fabricated: the couple had failed to produce a male heir; several miscarriages had followed the birth of their daughter Elizabeth and Henry had begun to court Jane Seymour. In memory of Anne, on the 19th of May 2023, her precious Book of Hours was brought out from the archive and put on display at Hever, along with fascinating historical details that could be deduced from it.

A Book of Hours is basically a Christian prayer book designed to guide the spiritual life of a secular person. It often contains psalms, hymns, extracts from the gospels and prayers to be read at the canonical hours of the day from Matins to Compline. Affluent owners often had their books lavishly illuminated and sometimes they were wedding gifts given by a husband to a wife.  The books were  sometimes personalised through having the owners  themselves featured in the paintings or through featuring local saints; some have notes written in the margins, some were so much a part of daily life that they were hung from a woman's girdle, like her keys. In the case of Anne Boleyn's Book, the prayers in English show more wear, from kissing or rubbing the pages, than the Latin prayers. It is tempting to see in this the enthusiasm Anne had for promoting an English Bible for all to be able to read, as shown by her protection of those working on English translations. However, the Hever exhibition points out that after Anne's death the Book was owned by various Kentish women who may not have known Latin and whose use of the book would have left its mark. 

The English Schoolhttps://thetudortravelguide.com/2019/09/21/hever-castle/

Anne was originally a maid of honour to the Queen, Catherine of Aragon, but by 1527, the year of the book's printing, Henry was hotly pursuing Anne and was considering the annulment of his marriage to Catherine. Assistant creator Kate McCaffrey explains in the Hever exhibition that books from this printing were commissioned for the English court, including both Catherine and Anne, but that their copies are of different quality.  

The vivid colours used in illumination were made from sources such as charred wood (black)  lapis lazuli( blue) gold, cuttlefish ink (sepia), crushed insects ( crimson)  or limonite (ochre). Anne's Book of Hours is decorated with gold borders, red and blue corner patterns and oval borders with inscriptions, whereas Catherine's is plainer. Whether this was perhaps due to Anne, full of confidence as she moved towards becoming Queen, commissioning the books herself, or whether the books were gifts from the King  that reveal his  coldness to  Catherine and his passionate interest in Anne is a matter for speculation.

The rivalry between Anne and Catherine is further shown in a tiny illumination in Anne's music book in which her emblem, the falcon, is shown pecking rather viciously  at Catherine's emblem, the pomegranate.   

Leaving aside the machinations of Court, I was also intrigued to see an inscription in Anne's own hand at the foot of one of the pages of her Book of Hours.

In June 1528, when Henry was still married to Catherine and pursuing Anne, a 'sweating sickness' occurred in London that sent the court, in action all too reminiscent of the last few years,  scattering to the countryside to quarantine. Anne and her father at Hever became dangerously ill and Anne's brother-in-law died of the virus. Kate McCaffrey's research suggests that the inscription was written at around this time, possibly while Anne battled with the death-dealing illness. 

It reads:

 Remember me when you do pray

that hope doth lead from day to day

 - Anne Boleyn 

It  made me shiver to think about what lay ahead of her only eight years later. I reflected on the relief she must have felt on her recovery, the determination to seize the day and her opportunity to become Queen and how fragile human hopes can be. 

 

 

The "Other" Boleyns by Mary Hoffman

How many Boleyns do you know about? Well, Anne of course. The first English queen to be beheaded at the behest of her husband. And if you know of her fate, it's likely you will have heard of her brother George, with whom she was tried for treason and incest, and who met the same fate as his sister, along with four other men a few days before Anne went to the block.

But hands up if you didn't know about Mary Boleyn until Philippa Gregory wrote The Other Boleyn Girl? Mary, who has undergone a subtler re-imagining by Hilary Mantel since then, was Anne's  sister, who had preceded her as Henry the Eighth's mistress. She was married to William Carey before the king took her to bed and the paternity of her two children has been questioned.

Thomas, the father, and George, the brother of the two "Boleyn girls," have been overshadowed by the attention given to their female relatives. There may not be much material available to researchers, especially about George, but Lauren McKay has found what there is and assembled it handily in Among the Wolves of Court (I B Tauris).

The Hans Holbein portrait above was for a long time identified as Thomas Boleyn but current thinking says it's more likely to be James Butler, who contended with Thomas for the title of Earl of Ormond. There was a suggestion at one time that Anne might have married this man. So Thomas remains elusive if we want to know what he looked like.

What is clear from the documents researched by McKay is that he was an accomplished ambassador whose gifts soon made him part of Henry's inner circle. His embassies to France and elsewhere won him the friendship of powerful and accomplished women like Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria and, although his missions later became exclusively connected with the king's Great Matter, seems to have remained popular in many courts.

For a courtier was what he was in spite of humbler beginnings. The Boleyn family were from East Anglia, from Salle in Norfolk and were originally wool merchants. They were important locally and prosperous but it wasn't until Thomas's grandfather, Geofftrey, that the family's influence spread beyond their immediate environment.

Geoffrey became Mayor of London and married a woman who was his social superior. He also managed to stay on the right side of both Yorkists and Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses, perhaps showing a diplomatic gift that Thomas would inherit. It was Geoffrey who bought Blickling Hall and whose property portfolio at his death was substantial.

Geoffrey's son, William, married Margaret Butler, from a Lancastrian family who fared ill under Edward lV but had their fortunes restored under Henry Vll. They had ten children of whom Thomas Boleyn was the oldest surviving son. His own marriage, to Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of the  Duke of Norfolk, was another step up the rungs of the social ladder.

McKay charts this upwards social trajectory, which was to end in being father-in-law to the king of England, with great skill and readability. And then we reach the bit that everyone thinks they know: Thomas's children: Mary, Anne and George.

Mary Boleyn

Anne Boleyn

The order of birth of the three children whose fates were so intertwined with King Henry and the breach between England and the Pope, is not certain but McKay goes with the idea that Anne was the eldest.

Her father sent her as a teenager to the court of Margaret of Austria. And later she was a lady-in-waiting to the king's younger sister, Mary at the time of her brief marriage to the king of France. Years before Thomas had accompanied the older sister, Margaret, to Scotland for her marriage to James lV.

In fact, there was scarcely any big event in Henry's early reign at which one or more Boleyn wasn't present, from the conversations the morning after the wedding night of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon to the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Thomas had been a protégé of Cardinal Wolsey and often carried out his embassies on Wolsey's instructions. But the picture that history has of him as a grasping and greedy father who benefitted  in honours and money from pimping out his daughters to the king whose close adviser Wolsey was seem unjustified.

Thomas was a deeply pious man and had earned his rise in fortune and the king's favour long before Mary and then Anne caught the royal eye.

In 1524, Thomas's father-in-law, the Duke of Norfolk, died and from then on he had to deal with his far from diplomatic brother-in-law, another Thomas, who inherited the title and would one day preside at the trial of his niece and nephew. Around this time young George Boleyn appears on the scene, aged twenty, with negotiations for her marriage to Jane Parker.

"Possibly" George Boleyn

George is even more elusive than Thomas in the documentary record but remember he was only just over thirty when he was executed. His wife Jane, whom history knows as Lady Rochford, was already linked to the Boleyns through marriages in the extended family and a suitable match. (But I do find it odd that Julia Fox's book Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford is not listed in the Bibliography).

Thomas was training George to follow in his ambassadorial footsteps. The young man was handsome, richly-dressed, educated and fluent in French. He had been a page at court from 1514; Mary became the king's mistress around 1521 and Anne was Henry's new love interest from about 1526. This proved ultimately the worst thing that could have happened to George.

Anne and her brother became the centre of a new young courtly circle of the beautiful people, who were also at the forefront of new ideas about religion. They were clever, cultured, fashionable, the in-crowd that all at court wanted to please. As long as Anne enjoyed the king's favour, she and her equally attractive and fascinating brother had the illusion that they were unassailable.

Enough has been written about what happened next, about Henry's arduous efforts at divorce, the breach with Rome, the marriage with Anne, the lack of a male heir and the turning of the king's interest to the altogether more malleable Jane Seymour. McKay admirably does not dwell on these. Both male Boleyns were present at the hearing in 1529 when Queen Katherine refused to recognise the court in which her marriage was being effectively tried.

Wolsey fell and Thomas Cromwell rose in favour. Thomas Boleyn became Earl of Wiltshire and George Viscount Rochford. But the wheel of fortune turned.

Anne Boleyn's silver falcon badge

Amazingly, Thomas survived his children's trial and execution. But he continued with his role at court as a noble and Knight of the Garter for the three years until his death. He even attended the funeral of Jane Seymour, his daughter's successor, and had duties connected with her corpse. What must his emotions have been?

At Thomas's death, Henry paid for masses to be said for his soul and his reputation does not seem to have been diminished at court, in spite of the crimes his children were convicted of and died for.

This is a splendidly researched and written book, very ill-served by the publisher. It is well-produced but terribly badly copy-edited and proofread. King Louise [sic] of France, "flair" as a verb when "flare" is meant  etc. And I can't believe it was the author who messed up Henry Wotton's famous definition of an ambassador so that it reads, "an honest gentleman sent abroad to lie for his country's good" - ouch!

The most egregious error is the attribution of the epigraph to Chapter Eleven to Shakespeare's Edward ll! (It's not from Marlowe but from Richard ll).

I do hope all these errors will be smoothed away if there is to be a paperback edition. They are unnecessary blemishes on a good piece of work.

"Graven with Diamonds" by Nicola Shulman - review by Katherine Langrish

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber…

I’ve always loved Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, so I was delighted a couple of years ago to come across Nicola Shulman’s wonderful account of his life and poems, ‘Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy’ (Short Books, 2011).  I meant to review it then, but was distracted by other things. Having just read it for the second time with as much thrilled admiration as before, I feel impelled to tell you all about it. You have to read this book! 

What makes it so different, besides being a detailed and knowledgeable biography, is Shulman’s fascinating interrogation of Wyatt’s lyrics. It is not a literary investigation, not an analysis of how he wrote. Rather,

This is a book about the uses of Wyatt’s love poetry; why he wrote. … At Henry’s [Henry VIII’s] court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his poems were the hub and centre … and if we run the story of Wyatt’s life and times behind his lyrics, they – these apparently slight, unaddressed, undated, unadorned songs – will show us that they had more uses than we might imagine. Not all of their uses are evident to us now. Some of them would have been hidden even to Wyatt, at the outset. When Wyatt began to write poems he could not have guessed into what strange service they would be pressed by the changing times. To see their changing purpose is the purpose of this book. 

Wyatt was a courtier, but what was a courtier? Shulman recreates for us the Tudor court of the 1520s and 30s with its formalities, its hierarchies, its dependence on chivalric games and lavish spectacles to ‘fill the new and potentially dangerous longueurs of peacetime’, its love of pastime (‘Pastime and good company/I love and shall until I die’, Henry VIII wrote) and above all, its youth. Aged only 21, Wyatt was one of fifteen esquires who challenged Henry – himself still in his early thirties – at the elaborate Christmas Joust at Greenwich in 1525. After the outdoor martial entertainments, the company would proceed indoors to be entertained with ‘diversions and amusements’ on the fashionable theme of courtly love. Lyric poetry was an integral part of this. 

The primary social purpose of courtly love lyrics [was] that they and all the activity they generated were a way of dealing with sexual frustrations at court. In emulation of Francis I’s practices, attractive women were more and more visible at Henry’s court, and yet no more sexually available to the many young men in attendance than they had been before. Women were aloof, and men continually supplicated for favours that must not, under the rules of the system, ever come. The lyric operated in the gap between hope and expectation.

Wyatt’s poems circulated in what amounted to a private Facebook group ‘intended for a closed, incestuous coterie consisting of the most precocious and sophisticated men and women of the court’, and Shulman vividly recreates the context outside of which these poems lose much of their point.

            Help me to seek, for I lost it there,

               And if that ye have found it, ye that be here,

               And seek to convey it secretly,

               Handle it soft and treat it tenderly

               Or else it will plain [complain] and then appair [be damaged].

This riddling rondeau about something Wyatt has lost, which of course in the last verse turns out to be his heart, seems yawnworthy enough – but, Shulman asks, what if what’s happening here is an actual, physical game?

What if ‘mine heart’ is also an actual object, a heart-shaped envelope made of cloth with a balloon, or squeaking thing inside?  Now the poem comes to life. Under that construction, the otherwise mystifying lines ‘Handle it soft and treat it tenderly/Or else it will plain and then appair’, make sudden sense: if you are rough with it, it will pop or squeal, and go flat. 

Now we can imagine groups of giggling young people dashing about trying to smuggle an inflated heart from one room to another: a lost world in which a poem beginning ‘Comfort thyself, my woeful heart’ and includes lines such as, ‘Alas I find thee faint and weak,’ may conjure a vision of Wyatt making everyone laugh as he holds up a bladdered heart and makes it squeak. As Shulman says, 

It casts new light on a tiny Holbein drawing where a young couple in elegant dress are shown with a cup and a large heart. 

It wasn’t all sheer fun. Gossip and jealousy and spite must also have run rife through the court. Courtly love was an elaborate pretence; all the same, some young people probably really were in love – and in danger of losing their reputations.  

Take heed betime lest ye be spied,

Your loving eyes you cannot hide,

At last the truth will sure be tried,

Therefore take heed!

For some there be of crafty kind

Though ye show no part of your mind,

Surely their eyes ye cannot blind,

Therefore take heed!

A poem like this could have been an uncomfortable thing to encounter, passed around and recited, as malicious smiles and sideways glances picked out the blushing subjects. Wyatt’s carefulness to name no names, the apparent anonymity and deliberate ambiguity of his verse, was as much a protection for himself as it was for others. He left it possible for himself always to protest innocence.

            For what I sung or spake

               Men did my songs mistake.

There was a fine line to be trodden between amusing people, and making enemies – a line which, once Anne Boleyn was queen, became a matter of life and death.  

Shulman argues convincingly that Thomas Wyatt had, once, been in love with Anne Boleyn. In a sonnet written long after Anne’s disgrace and death, Wyatt declares himself to be in love again, this time with a blonde woman, someone very different from ‘Brunet that set my wealth [my well-being] in such a roar.’ 

‘Brunet’ is Anne Boleyn. There can be very little doubt about this, because Wyatt originally wrote,

Her that did set our country in a roar.

Then he thought better of it and amended the line in his own handwriting. In place of the too-explicit reference he put one word, ‘Brunet’ – just enough to invoke Anne, but only to those people at court who knew both that Wyatt was the author of this poem and that he had once pursued Anne Boleyn.

Unpicking the ambiguities of Wyatt’s verse to reveal the secret life of the court, Shulman shows how the elegant game of courtly love, played by young courtiers to unwritten rules which everyone understood, was ripped into coloured shreds by Thomas Cromwell. Flirting with the queen and her ladies had been de rigeur, la politesse, the correct behaviour for a courtier who wished to shine. (And it was later to be revived by Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, for her own political purposes, once she became queen.)

Cromwell … knew perfectly well how the courtly bargain worked in the case of a queen: amorous protestations were paid in, and favours paid out in grants, offices and promotions, not sex. 

Choosing, deliberately, to interpret all those courtly flirtations literally and legalistically, Cromwell brought Anne and her coterie to the block – and Wyatt to the Tower, though he escaped deeper involvement because Cromwell rather liked him, and there were enough other victims. And yet Wyatt wasn’t silenced. Shulman shows again and again how, for those who knew how to read his ever-ambiguous lyrics, Wyatt speaks out – candidly, boldly, sometimes in anguish – about the tragic and dangerous events in which he found himself embroiled. To all fans of Thomas Wyatt, as well as to all lovers of poetry and history, I recommend this brilliant and fascinating book.

Picture credits

Courtly couple, Hans Holbein the Younger, Kunstmuseum, Basle, wikimedia commons 

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Hans Holbein the Younger, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Anne Boleyn, artist unknown, National Portrait Gallery London, wikimedia commons

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, Hans Holbein the Younger, Frick Collection, public domain

Losing Their Heads and Losing Their Minds – Elizabeth Fremantle tells tales from the Tower

The heroine of The Girl in the Glass Tower, Arbella Stuart, spent a number of years until her death in captivity at the Tower of London. The Tower of my title refers in part to this but also to her virtual imprisonment during her youth at Hardwick Hall, famously dubbed 'more glass than wall', by a contemporary wag. Poor Arbella was fated to live a life of almost permanent detainment, punctuated only by her increasingly dramatic attempts at escape, because she had the misfortune to be born with a claim to the English throne Alas, there would be no escape from her final detention and the Tower of London casts a long shadow over my novel.

I was invited recently to give a talk at the Tower and rather than just discuss my most recent heroine I thought it would be apt to highlight some of the many women for whom the Tower was the defining site in their lives, either as their place of execution or imprisonment. It was the advent of the Tudors, an upstart family who had to keep a tight reign on any potential usurpers, that saw a spate of women meeting their brutal ends on Tower Green.

The stories of Henry VIII's wives have proved endlessly fascinating, inspiring an apparently endless stream of novels and films. This is probably because the sheer barbarity of their treatment at the hands of a despotic husband horrifies us but also resembles the kind of dark fairy tales we were raised on. However there were few happy endings if you were inconvenient to  Henry. We all know of Anne Boleyn, committed to death on trumped up charges of adultery and incest, waiting interminable days for the arrival of the French executioner who would dispatch her with a sword rather than the more traditional axe. This was considered a merciful concession from her husband as a sword was meant to be a painless way to go.

On my way to give the talk I wandered though the cobbled lanes of the Tower after dark, the grey stone buildings looming, an air of intimidation hanging over the place, and it was brought home to me just how that young woman might have felt facing a death so sudden and unjust: one moment the feted Queen, the next a head rolling into a bucket. How might little Catherine Howard, the other of Henry's queens executed for adultery, have felt, still a teenager, when she asked for the block to be brought to her on the eve of her execution, so she could practice placing her head correctly?

It is the stuff of horror stories and we feel that kind of barbarity is far, far removed from our lives now but it is deeply shocking to remember that there are still parts of the world in which adultery is punishable by execution, or more specifically, death by stoning. When we remember a woman like Margaret Pole, one of the last true Plantagenets and deemed a threat to Tudor supremacy, it forces us to confront the reality of past practices to which we must never return, the like of which still persist in in some cultures. Margaret Pole was condemned aged sixty eight, by Henry VIII, and dispatched on Tower Green in a botch job of monstrous proportions. A horrified eye witness described her execution as being performed by ‘a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.’

And there is Jane Grey, the seventeen-year-old who died, becoming a poster girl for the Protestant cause. It is deeply shocking to think of her age – were she alive now she'd have been studying for her A Levels – still a child really. Reading accounts of her execution affected me profoundly, partly because my own daughter was of a similar age at the time, and provided the inspiration for the opening scenes of my 2014 novel Sisters of Treason. Jane went to the block with extraordinary poise, buoyed up by her faith, no sense of the fear that must have roiled beneath her surface. She had been the victim of her Tudor blood, pushed onto the throne in the name of scheming ambition on the part of the men around her. Her reign lasted only a few days before her cousin, Mary Tudor, raised an army, pushed her out, locked her up and executed the men behind her. But in the end she too was deemed too great a threat to be allowed to live.

Jane was not alone in discovering that Tudor blood could be more curse than blessing. She had two younger sisters, who lived in the dark shadow of her fate. The older, Katherine Grey, was to  also experience incarceration in the Tower. Katherine had committed the crime of marrying without Queen Elizabeth's permission – with royal blood this was treason. She was twenty-one years old and heavily pregnant with the child that came out of that secret marriage, when she was thrown in the Tower. Elizabeth, whose position was by no means stable at that point, moved quickly to have the marriage deemed illegal, making the son who was born soon after,  illegitimate. Elizabeth was right to be paranoid as that boy would have had a strong claim to the throne, and being male, might well have proved to be an insurmountable threat to her position.

Katherine Grey ended up, not under the flash of the executioners axe, but bringing on her own grim and painful end through self-starvation. To die through the refusal of food was not considered suicide, which perhaps explains such an action in the context of a culture bound by religious codes. It might also explain why, in a strange and morbid repetition, this was also the means by which Arbella Stuart finally brought about her own death. It was ultimately for her, in a life of attempted escapes and with her sanity wearing thin, the only possible means of escape from the Tower's menacing walls.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novels The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, and Sisters of Treason, about Jane Grey and her sisters, are published by Penguin.

IN LOVE WITH THE SONNET – Elizabeth Fremantle

Anne boleyn

Valentine’s Day almost upon us, which means a plethora of gaudy scarlet gewgaws, overpriced cellophane-wrapped roses, the impossibility of booking a restaurant table for more than two people anywhere in the known universe and worst of all: bad poetry. A modern lover might be happy with a few kitsch emojis, or (perish the thought) a photograph of their beloved’s privates, but in the past expectations were higher and romance had more class and better poetry.

Tudor poet Tomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet to England during Henry VIII’s reign. Originating in Italy it was a form that became associated, more than any other, with the expression of love and particularly the forbidden or unrequited love of a man for a woman. In a sonnet the identity of the beloved is often deliberately obscured to protect her privacy, as is the case in Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem, Whoso List to Hunt, which is believed to be about the very married Anne Boleyn. There is no proof that Anne was ever Wyatt’s lover in a physical sense, and certainly not while she was married to Henry VIII, but when he wrote: 'there is written her fair neck round about,/Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,' it is thought he was lamenting the fact that Anne had become the untouchable wife of Henry VIII – the Latin phrase translating as ‘touch me not’.

Lady Rich

It was sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan soldier poet, who wrote the first sonnet cycle in English. Astrophel and Stella, a sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is a heartrending expression of Sidney’s profoundly jealous love for Lady Rich, a woman who had once been suggested as a bride for him but had been forced into marriage with a man who would bring great wealth to her noble but impoverished family.

The poems express a sense of lovelorn masochism and Sidney reasons that in writing down his feelings, 'She might take some pleasure of my pain'. He repeatedly uses the word ‘Rich’ in his descriptions of his beloved and when he says she: 'Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is', he makes no attempt to hide Lady Rich’s identity, which suggests his love for her was common knowledge in court circles, leaving little need for secrecy.

Secrecy though is a feature of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He experimented with the form, turning it on its head, as a large number of the sonnets in his collection are, unusually, addressed to a ‘fair youth’. The idea of the bard’s possible homosexuality has often been explained away by suggesting that the poems are written to express a platonic admiration for a benefactor, but whether or not they describe a chaste love the mystery of the person he described as ‘the master mistress of my passion’ has captivated Shakespeare scholars for centuries.

A number of sonnets in Shakespeare’s collection are addressed to a woman and in these he experiments further with the form. Traditionally a sonnet used particular tropes of fairness to describe female beauty. In his poet beginning: 'My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun', he goes on to list the ways in which the woman’s looks diverge from what was then considered beautiful. There has been much speculation about the identity of the so-called ‘Dark Lady’, but Shakespeare’s secret has never been unlocked.

Today’s young lovers are more reluctant than their sixteenth century counterparts to spill their feelings in poetic form, and are more likely to resort to a few trite lines of doggerel in a hastily bought Hallmark card. But I wonder if anyone has ever tried to write an emoji sonnet– now there’s a challenge.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel Watch the Lady explores the love between Lady Rich and sir Philip Sidney and takes a look at the possible identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

The Undying fascination of Anne Boleyn by Mary Hoffman

If you put "Anne Boleyn" into a search engine, you get over two million results. Do the same on Amazon and you get over six hundred book titles. She plays a starring role in the two Man Booker Prize-winning novels of Hilary Mantel, which are being dramatised both by the RSC (where she is being played by Lydia Leonard) and on television (as yet casting not announced).

Welsh National Opera currently runs a Tudors season containing Donizetti's Anna Bolena. On Facebook there are pages called On the Tudor Trail and The Tudor Library, the latter listing over fifty current fiction and non-fiction titles about Henry Vlll's second wife, who died 477 years ago. Claire Ridgway runs a site called The Anne Boleyn Files which minutely examines every detail of Anne's brief and eventful life.

It is as if we still can't quite believe in that sequence of events from January to May 1536 that changed the world's view of Henry from handsome, golden, chivalric prince to bloated, bloodthirsty tyrant. As Hilary Mantel says, "we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation" (Guardian 11.5.2012)

(And I have just reinvented and killed her again in my latest novel).

Shown on BBC2 this May, The Last days of Anne Boleyn, presented by Dan Jones, pitted historians David Starkey and Susannah Lipscomb against novelists Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory. Anne was guilty as charged, she was totally innocent, she slept with her brother (Gregory), she swore before God on what she believed to be her last morning that she had done none of the things she was charged with (Mantel).

With such a wash of interest in the woman who was Queen for only three years, you would think it impossible for anyone to come up with a new angle but Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger have achieved it in their book In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn. These are the writers who run the On the Tudor Trail page on Facebook, the latter also having a site with the same name and the former one for her own fiction and non-fiction writing on "England's most iconic Queen Consort."

Divided into sections Early Life; The Courting Years; Anne the Queen; The 1535 Progress; Boleyn Treasures, the book is meticulously researched and well illustrated, with a Boleyn Family Tree and six maps.

After Hans Holbein

The Tower of London features in Anne the Queen because the Queen's Lodgings in the Royal Palace (no longer extant) were completely re-decorated for Anne's Coronation. But in that same section, the writers dispel several myths about her execution, which didn't take place where the memorial now stands on Tower Green.

The White Tower at the Tower of London.

Anne Boleyn was almost certainly born at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, but that house has been altered several times in the intervening centuries.

You can more easily imagine yourself in Anne's shoes at Hever Castle.

Hever Castle, the Boleyns' family seat

Anne went to Belgium when she was about twelve, to serve in the court of Margaret of Austria and was later in France, where as a teenager she learned to dance, to play musical instruments and generally behave like a Court lady. something that served her both well and badly later on in life.

The authors have tracked down all sorts of places associated with Anne Boleyn and visited most of them themselves, even though Grueninger lives in Australia. From Windsor to the Field of Cloth of Gold, Eltham Palace to Notre Dame, they have left no stone unturned in the search for locations where Anne is known or believed to have spent time. It is as thorough as it it is fascinating.

(I recommend reading this book alongside the late Eric Ives' excellent biography, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn.)