Anne Boleyn 'did conspire to kill Henry VIII' reveals expert

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King Henry VIII famously had six wives during his tumultuous 36-year reign over Tudor England. His extraordinary life will be explored on Channel 5 tonight in ‘Hampton Court: Behind Closed Doors’. The documentary takes viewers inside Henry’s former royal residence on the River Thames in southwest London. Hampton Court was once the King’s pleasure palace, devoted to his lavish displays of wealth and his gluttonous appetite.

The royal residence, completed around 1540, today handles thousands of visitors every year.

The Channel 5 programme looks at how its devoted team of staff look after Hampton’s grand rooms like the Great Hall built for Henry.

The cameras also capture the efforts of the palace’s gardeners who tend to its stunning parklands and spectacular maze, as well as the grooms who care for Hampton’s rare shire horses.

Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, is known to have visited Hampton during her and the King’s passionate love affair, which ended with her execution in 1536.

Now, an historian has revealed to Express.co.uk how she was left staggered as she uncovered Henry’s love letters to Anne from an archive.

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Sandra Vasoli, who is based in the US, wrote the 2015 book ‘Anne Boleyn’s Letter from the Tower: A New Assessment’.

She spoke of her amazement at a collection of 17 letters Henry penned to his Queen, which are housed in the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican Library in Rome.

She said: “When I first looked at them, there’s something that just comes off the page.

“You can see them digitised and there are a couple of them that are fairly available on the internet, even though the Vatican Library does protect them.

“But when you see them in person, when you sit right there with them, it’s so uncanny.

“There is just an aura that comes off of them that is very hard to describe.”

The historian, who is writing a new book about the letters, claimed they expose intriguing details about the couple’s relationship.

She said: “Some of them you can kind of mark in time, but others you cannot.

“But what I found the first time I looked at them was that Henry pursued her for almost seven years, and she kept him at bay.

“She kept him at a distance. And really, in that way, she was alluring and seductive, but she didn’t really return affection.

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“And a lot of people even say he was a predator and she was trying to get away from him.”

However, Ms Vasoli’s interpretation of the letters, which are not dated, was that Henry and Anne shared a deep love for one another.

She said: “I looked through them, I came away from that session knowing that she loved him, that she grew to love him.

“And she loved him, I would say, as much as he loved her. And that surprised me.

“But one of the really notable things about the early ones is that it is like a schoolboy who is writing.

“The early ones were very, very neat. We know Henry did not like to write. He had scribes, secretaries who wrote for him all the time.

“His handwriting was large, just like him. Large and very bombastic.”

‘Hampton Court: Behind Closed Doors’ airs on Channel 5 tonight from 7:15pm.

‘Anne Boleyn’s Letter from the Tower: A New Assessment’ was written by Sandra Vasoli and published by MadeGlobal Publishing in 2015. It is available here.

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