The complete letters, dispatches and chronicles that tell the real story of Anne Boleyn.

Now available again, the first book in Robin Maxwell's acclaimed Elizabethan Quartet: "Wonderfully juicy . . . Maxwell brings all of bloody Tudor England vividly to life” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). One was queen for a thousand days; one for over forty years. Both were passionate, headstrong women, loved and hated by Henry VIII. Yet until the discovery of the secret diary, Anne Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth I, had never really met. Anne was the second of Henry's six wives, doomed to be beloved, betrayed, and beheaded. When Henry fell madly in love with her upon her return from an education at the lascivious French court, he was already a married man. While his passion for Anne was great enough to rock the foundation of England and of all Christendom, in the end he forsook her for another love, schemed against her, and ultimately had her sentenced to death. But unbeknownst to the king, Anne had kept a diary. At the beginning of Elizabeth 's reign, it is pressed into her hands. In reading it, the young queen discovers a great deal about her much-maligned mother: Anne's fierce determination, her hard-won knowledge about being a woman in a world ruled by despotic men, and her deep-seated love for the infant daughter taken from her shortly after her birth. In the journal's pages, Elizabeth finds an echo of her own dramatic life as a passionate young woman at the center of England's powerful male establishment, and with the knowledge gained from them, makes a resolution that will change the course of history.

Anne Boleyn was the most controversial and scandalous woman ever to sit on the throne of England. From her early days at the imposing Hever Castle in Kent, to the glittering courts of Paris and London, Anne caused a stir wherever she went.

This illuminating history examines the life and many legends of the 16th century Queen who was executed by her husband, King Henry VIII. Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and a revealing look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is her story so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: neither.) But the most provocative question of all concerns Anne’s death: How could Henry order the execution of a once beloved wife? Drawing on scholarship and critical analysis, Bordo probes the complexities of one of history’s most infamous relationships. She then demonstrates how generations of polemicists, biographers, novelists, and filmmakers have imagined and re-imagined Anne: whore, martyr, cautionary tale, proto “mean girl,” feminist icon, and everything in between. In The Creation of Anne Boleyn, Bordo steps off the well-trodden paths of Tudoriana to tease out the human being behind the competing mythologies, paintings, and on-screen portrayals.

A bold new analysis of one of history's most misrepresented women. History has lied. Anne Boleyn has been sold to us as a dark figure, a scheming seductress who bewitched Henry VIII into divorcing his queen and his church in an unprecedented display of passion. Quite the tragic love story, right? Wrong. In this electrifying expos , Hayley Nolan explores for the first time the full, uncensored evidence of Anne Boleyn's life and relationship with Henry VIII, revealing the shocking suppression of a powerful woman. So leave all notions of outdated and romanticised folklore at the door and forget what you think you know about one of the Tudors' most notorious queens. She may have been silenced for centuries, but this urgent book ensures Anne Boleyn's voice is being heard now. #TheTruthWillOut

Review: "In this groundbreaking new biography, G.W. Bernard offers a fresh portrait of one of England's most captivating queens. Through a wide-ranging forensic examination of sixteenth-century sources, Bernard reconsiders Boleyn's girlhood, her experience at the French court, the nature of her relationship with Henry and the authenticity of her evangelical sympathies. He depicts Anne Boleyn as a captivating, intelligent and highly sexual woman whose attractions Henry resisted for years until marriage could ensure legitimacy for their offspring." "He shows that it was Henry, not Anne, who developed the ideas that led to the break with Rome. And, most radically, he argues that the allegations of adultery that led to Anne's execution in the Tower could he close to the truth."--BOOK JACKET

Henry VIII is risking his marriage and the political strategies of Cardinal Wolsey in his obsession to marry Anne Boleyn, who does not welcome the king's advances and loathes the cardinal for breaking her betrothal to Harry Percy.