‘I am not mad,’ I shout. ‘But I am completely innocent. Good people, I beg you to implore the king for mercy. I have done nothing wrong but one terrible thing, one terrible thing. And I was punished for that, you know I was punished for it. Nobody blamed me for it but it was the worst thing a wife could do . . . I loved him . . .’ There is a roll of drums which drowns out everything but my own crying. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry for it . . .’

They drag me back from the rail at the front of the stage and they force me down into the stained sawdust. They force my hands on to the block, which is wet with her blood. When I look at my hands they are as red with blood as if I am a killer. I will die with innocent blood on my hands.

‘I am innocent,’ I shout. They wrestle the blindfold on me so I can see nothing. ‘I am innocent of everything. I have always been innocent of everything. The only thing I ever did, the only sin ever, was against George, for love of George, my husband George, God forgive me for that—I want to confess . . .’

‘On the count of three,’ the guard says. ‘One-two-three.’

FIVE YEARS LATER—ANNE, HEVER CASTLE,

JANUARY 1547

So, he is dead at last, my husband who denied me, the man who failed the promise of his youth, the king who turned tyrant, the scholar who went mad, the beloved boy who became a monster. It was only his death that saved his last wife, Katherine Parr, who was to be arrested for treason and heresy; but death, which had been his ally, his partner and his pander for so long, finally came for him.

How many did the king kill? We can start to count now that death has stilled his murderous will. Thousands. No-one will ever know. Up and down the land the burnings in the market place for heresy, the hanging at the gallows for treason. Thousands and thousands of men and women whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. Papists who held to the religion of their fathers, reformers who wanted the new ways. Little Kitty Howard among the dead, whose only crime was that she loved a boy of her own age and not a man old enough to be her father, and rotting from the leg upwards. This is the man they call a great king, the greatest king that we have ever had in England. Does it not teach us that we should have no king? That a people should be free? That a tyrant is still a tyrant even when he has a handsome face under a crown?

I think of the Boleyn inheritance that meant so much to Lady Rochford. She was the heir, in the end. She inherited the death of her sister-in-law, of her husband. Her inheritance and poor Kitty’s, was death on the scaffold, just like them. I have a share of the Boleyn inheritance too, this pretty little castle set in the Kent countryside, my favourite home.