The cruelty of the past can be thrown into sharp relief by present-day knowledge. Anne gave birth to a healthy child, Elizabeth, and then had three miscarriages. Another historian, Alison Weir, argues that she was one of those rare women who are rhesus negative: when a man is rhesus positive and his partner negative, problems do not occur with the first child but they do with subsequent pregnancies. If Anne had given Henry and England a male heir, she would have been invulnerable. But she did not. Over Easter in 1536, Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Chief Minister and at one time Anne’s ally, decided to destroy her. It took him three weeks to launch a coup against her family and her faction, fix witnesses, rig a trial and have her dead.

So, an attractive and ambitious woman gets to the centre of a dangerous maze of male power to find there is only one way out: her death. It is a tragic and highly dramatic scenario and, as far as it goes, true. But it is a modern reading. There was a whole other dimension to Anne.

She was religious. More: she was a Protestant, a reformer, and an admirer of William Tyndale.

Tyndale’s name provoked fear and loathing amongst both Catholics and moderate Protestants. He was in hiding on the outskirts of Antwerp (he was betrayed and publicly strangled and burnt in the same year as Anne’s execution). His vivid, egalitarian translation of the Bible was banned, but copies were smuggled into England. Anne had one. She may well have been directly in touch with Tyndale. She certainly got hold of his The Obedience of a Christian Man when it was published in 1528. This was an explosive book, a key text of the Reformation, attacking the Pope and the Church. An incensed Cardinal Wolsey confiscated it from one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting. Anne went to the King and Wolsey was forced to return it. Anne marked up passages for Henry to read. He commented: ‘This book is for me and for all kings to read.’

It is as if there was a Joan of Arc, driven by a religious vision, within the more familiar figure of Anne the dazzling sexual predator. She even died for religious reasons: she discovered Cromwell was stealing huge sums from the dissolution of the monasteries, money meant for the establishment of universities and religious schools. He moved so quickly because he feared she would tell the King.