FEW royal indiscretions have come close to having the impact of King Henry VIII’s affair with Anne Boleyn.

In two-part documentary Henry VIII & Anne: The Lovers Who Changed History, historian Suzannah Lipscomb takes a look at their tumultuous relationship, asking why a king would risk his own future and that of his country for a woman he would later sentence to death.

Was it love that brought them together and tore them apart – or was it all a little more complicated than that?

Lipscombe examines their backgrounds, a quest that takes her from Anne’s childhood home of Hever Castle, in Kent, to the Chatois de Blois, in France, where the future queen would have mixed with some of the most important figures in Renaissance Europe, and also, according to some accounts at least, learned the art of seduction.

But it was at Hampton Court that she was to win Henry’s heart, and ultimately seal her fate.