There are many Anne Boleyns. Popular culture – as in the television series The Tudors – sees her as a bright, sexy girl, manoeuvred by an ambitious father and his friends into the King’s bed. Historians disagree. David Starkey sees her as ‘a brutal and effective politician’ who was, after all, able to bring down the King’s First Minister, Cardinal Wolsey – whom she hated, ironically, for blocking a possible betrothal when she was younger. Antonia Fraser, who is very much of the Catholic party of Henry’s first wife, the much put-upon and infuriatingly correct Catherine of Aragon, sees Anne as a schemer and a poseur. She accuses her of ‘religious chic’, always making sure she had a religious book in her hands when someone important came into the room. In her recent novel, Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel gives us an extraordinary Anne, calculating yet instinctive, almost feral, a very dangerous woman indeed.

There is some truth, no doubt, in all these perceptions of her. Clearly she was formidable. When she was thirteen she was sent abroad, first to Burgundy then to Paris as a lady-in-waiting to the French Queen. Both Courts were notorious for political infighting; Anne observed and learnt. Her French became flawless; later, as favourite, then Queen, she made herself invaluable to Henry in the endless, convoluted negotiations with the French King.

By all accounts she was not a conventional beauty, but she seriously unnerved men. Perhaps it was a directness of gaze, a centred confidence, a charm without deference that bowled them over. She was also armed with a flashing and at times indiscreet wit and, when needed, a hell of a temper – she was, after all, the future mother of Elizabeth I.

When King Henry fell in love with her in 1526, she refused to sleep with him. She kept him hooked but at bay for nearly seven years while negotiations with the Pope to secure an annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine foundered and then failed. The prurient Court gossips speculated, month by month, how far up Anne’s thigh Henry was allowed to go. They finally slept together in Calais, a few weeks before they were married in great secrecy on the 25th of January 1533. Anne quickly became pregnant.