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The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is one of the most remarkable in history: a long courtship followed by a shotgun wedding and then a coronation, ending just short of three years later when a husband''s passion turned to such hatred that he simply wanted his wife gone. Missing from most accounts is how the turbulent nature of Anne and Henry''s relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of British and European history. This was a marriage that convulsed not just a nation, but a whole continent. Drawing on new archival documents, startling artefactual discoveries and reinterpretations of long-misunderstood sources, John Guy and Julia Fox unearth the truth of these two extraordinary lives and their tumultuous times. They pay particular attention to the formative years Anne spent in the French courts while Henry learned how to be king among English courtiers - and dispel any lingering assumptions that a sixteenth-century woman, even a queen, could exert little to no influence on the politics and beliefs of a patriarchal society. is a sumptuous retelling of one of the most consequential marriages in history and a startling portrait of love, lust, politics and power.>
Report
The prologue is indicative of the book as a whole, which combines meticulously researched history and contemporary voices with narrative flair . . . The Guy/Fox approach is fresh partly because they are a married couple writing about a marriage, but more because they reframe the story in the context of continental European politics, in contrast to the parochial English exceptionalism that pervades writing about this era. The authors have uncovered a fair bit of new material in their scouring of the archives and libraries of Europe, the most interesting relating to Anne's teenage years on the Continent Gavanndra Hodge Sunday Times
