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“She railed at him for debating the divorce of his formidable wife: ‘Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ she snapped. Another time, she was in the king’s privy chamber and, hearing that Wolsey was hovering importantly outside, waiting for her dismissal and the commencement of men’s business, she rapped out a message for him to come and join them: ‘Where else should he come, except where the king is?’

As we see from this, she interpreted the role of courtly lady to the utmost of its potential. She became more powerful than any man. Paradoxically, once it was recognised that she and no other– not her father Thomas, not her uncle Norfolk– was now ‘the true inheritor of that ultimate royal favour that had been Wolsey’s strength’, she attracted a degree of enmity more usually associated with hated male favourites than mistresses. Perhaps the manner of her operations – as an incarnation of the eternal feminine – aggravated her enemies’ frustrations by making it impossible for them to compete.

[For] they were men. It was hardly in the Duke of Suffolk’s remit to spring like a nymph onto the back of Henry’s saddle and ride off in pillion with him, laughing and whispering into his ear. But Anne could. With her wit, her dazzle, her ludic, punning Burgundian manners, she melted into his dream of Albion.”