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Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit,

the podcasts in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs,

from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise,

relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft.

Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.

There are many narratives about why Ambelin became Henry VIII's second wife.

If you were to believe the films and the TV

series, Natalie Dormer as Anne, for example, you'd think it was all about her beauty and sex appeal.

And certainly, contemporaries did record her attractive dark eyes and the way she had of

wielding them. Their power was such that many a man yielded to her his obedience,

wrote L'Artsle de Car. But that's not all. We're also told that she was ambitious,

that she sought to be queen. Here's an extract from a children's book, quoted by my guest

today. This is from the Lady Bird history books on which so many of us in Britain were raised.

She had been well educated, partly in France, and was a good musician, but she was ambitious

and unscrupulous. When she realised that she had attracted the attention of Henry, she was

determined to become Queen at any cost. Perhaps if she had known that the cost was to be her

...