Tudor historian John Guy, teams up with his wife and fellow historian Julia Fox to provide an insight into the relationship  between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Anne was shrewder and more powerful than Henry who was more sensitive and vulnerable. Their story is one of the most remarkable in history a long courtship followed by 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.  Anne and Henry’s relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of European history and dispel any assumptions that a sixteenth-century woman, even a queen, could exert little influence on the politics and beliefs of a patriarchal society. Anne was in fact a shrewd and ruthless politician in her own right, a woman who steered Henry and his policies- and whom Henry seriously contemplated making joint sovereign. Hunting the Falcon reveals the seven missing yeats that Anne spent in France, and explores how she organized her side of the royal court in novel ways that ultimately sowed the seeds of her own downfall and offer a sumptuous retelling of one of the most consequential marriages in history and an exhilarating portrait of love, lust, politics and power.

Interpretation of their marriage that produced Protestant England and the greatest of all the British monarchs, Elizabeth I. With a paranoiac court where mild flirtation could lead to torture and disembowelment, the story still hs the power to shock: Henry Tudor meets Joseph Stalin, but Anne Boleyn a strong independent woman paid a horrific price for it.

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe by John Guy and Julia Fox, Bloomsbury £30.