Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn, Interviews, Straight History, Tudors May 19, 2014

The Secret Love of Henry Percy and Anne Boleyn: An Interview with Elizabeth Norton

Long before Anne Boleyn was relentlessly pursued by King Henry VIII, long before she could ever have dreamed that she would enter into a marriage that would change the course of English history and put her on the throne, Anne Boleyn had simpler ambitions. Anne hoped to become a countess, albeit by marrying into one of the most powerful families in the realm. Henry Percy is a shadowy figure in Anne Boleyn’s life. After their romance ended, Percy fades into…

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Anne Boleyn, Interviews, Tudors May 9, 2014

Who is George Boleyn? A Guest Article by Clare Cherry

  For centuries, George Boleyn has lived in the shadow of the Boleyn women.  Although the Boleyns are one of the most controversial families in Tudor history, they are often overlooked due to  the all-encompassing legacies of Queen Anne Boleyn and the immortal Queen Elizabeth I. George’s sister, Mary Boleyn – the long-time mistress of her sister’s future husband Henry VIII – has recently emerged as the romantic heroine who outlived them all. George’s wife “that bawd” Jane Boleyn, who for centuries has been the Boleyn scapegoat, carries the burden of…

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Anne Boleyn, Cersei Lannister, Tudors April 18, 2014

“Pay for Dinner?” “I Incest”: Anne Boleyn, Lucrezia Borgia, & Cersei Lannister

Between The Borgias, The Pillars of the Earth and Game of Thrones, we have seen rather a lot of incestuous relationships in medieval settings on television in the last few years. We even had a recent allegation of incest in The White Queen. The Pillars of the Earth producers made the decision to add an incestuous relationship between mother and son, William and Regan Hamleigh, which was not actually depicted in the book. Considering Pillars has a set of fictional…

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Anne Boleyn, Tudors April 11, 2014

Anne Boleyn and Margaery Tyrell Take Aim at Love and a Throne

  Natalie Dormer is no stranger to playing the Queen. Having played the enigmatic Anne Boleyn in Showtime’s The Tudors, there were going to be some inevitable comparisons between Margaery Tyrell and Anne Boleyn. One is a fictional queen and one is amongst the most controversial queens in English history. Natalie is resolved to separate the two: “You’ll appreciate that I’m trying very, very hard as an actor to separate my characterizations,” Natalie said in an interview last year. “It…

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Anne Boleyn, Tudors April 11, 2014

Introducing the Anne Boleyn Series: Margaery, Cersei, and Melisandre

Over the next few weeks, in honor of Anne Boleyn and some of the Game of Thrones characters she may have inspired –we will be running a series of articles and interviews with historians about her. George RR Martin appears to have taken threads of factual — and counterfactual  (the opposite of historical events) — aspects of Anne’s story and woven them into various Game of Thrones characters like Cersei, Margaery, and Melisandre. Each character represents a different facet of…

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