Anne Boleyn is usually flattened into a caricature: the ambitious seductress or the helpless victim. The surviving records, letters, and ambassadors’ dispatches tell the story of a brilliant strategist whose continental education gave her the ideological tools to help break England from Rome.

This episode follows her from the sophisticated courts of Margaret of Austria and Queen Claude, through a seven-year courtship with Henry VIII, to a coronation, a daughter named Elizabeth, and a rapid, brutal downfall engineered by her enemies.

• How her French reformist education shaped the English Reformation
• Refusing to be Henry’s mistress after watching her sister discarded
• The Great Matter, the captive Pope, and the break with Rome
• Her clash with Thomas Cromwell over seized monastery wealth
• The show trial, the scaffold speech, and the myths invented after her death