Six Tudor Queens : Anne Boleyn, A King's Obsession
Alison Weir's Six Tudor Queens series turns from Katherine of Aragon to the woman who displaced her. Anne Boleyn leaves England at eleven for the royal courts of Burgundy and France, and returns years later polished, sharp and unwilling to be anybody's ornament.
At the English court she plays the game of courtly love as well as anyone — until the King commands, and the game stops being a game. Weir traces the long pursuit, the break with Rome, the marriage, Anne's desperate need to give Henry a son, and the swiftness with which the charges against her were assembled.
Drawing on her work as a historian, Weir presents Anne not as a schemer or a victim but as an ambitious, idealistic and deeply flawed woman, and argues that the accusations that sent her to the scaffold were false.
Raised in the courts of Burgundy and France, she returns to England and becomes the object of Henry VIII's obsession.
The King whose pursuit of Anne breaks England from Rome.
Henry's first queen, whom Anne displaces.