The Temptress, Anne Boleyn

I think it was my first year of secondary school when I initially became entranced by the vampy sensuality of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second, and most evil, wife. Well, the only evil one, and that's only if distorted legends are to be believed. I still remember watching a documentary in class that featured jousting, and Anne removing her gloves to reveal her stubby sixth finger and cackling lasciviously, throwing her head back as the camera swirled around to make her seem like a delicious psychopath. Since then, she's been my strangest celebrity fantasy. I might add that in my imagination, she's a lot closer to the buxom Natalie Dormer version in the Tudors tv programme than to the actual version in her royal painting, which I'm sure has been wildly distorted to make her seem a lot more demure and unappealing than her true likeness. Perhaps the real Anne was so stunning that painters fled with their eyes burning at her beauty, and somebody who'd never met her had to invent a dowdy image instead.

Boleyn is a great character, a woman so entrancing that she managed the unthinkable: not only enticing Henry away from his wife of many years, Catherine of Aragon, but doing so with him in full knowledge that the consequences would be the severing of ties with Catholicism and ostracising of England from countries that they shared an uneasy peace with at the time, particularly Spain, where Catherine was born. Of course, Henry's hand was partially forced by the desperation to secure himself a male heir, but I like to think that without Anne's wily witchiness he simply would never have considered that he might have the power to renounce Catholicism, instead satisfying himself with nominating an heir already living, rather than trying to manufacture a new one, no matter how much uncertainty that may have put around his legacy. In my eyes, Boleyn was sent to Henry's court by the Devil to destroy Christianity in its present Catholic form, and her sensual powers were such that every man in the kingdom fell under her spell, while women were left cold and flummoxed by the intense devotion she inspired. Maybe none of the legend of her is really true, and the witch Anne was popularised after her death to validate Henry's decision to have his wife beheaded, but it's a really exciting idea that she came to Court with her supernatural powers to wreak havoc, and that for a time she succeeded.

In the end it was delivering a still-born baby, who is theorised to have been horribly disfigured, that lifted the wool from Henry's eyes. He was able to see her full wickedness made flesh in this devil-child, and swiftly invent a tale of her sleeping with her brother to dispatch her. Still, Anne's sex-stained devilry was to forever taint the kingdom in the form of the Church of England, and caused deaths for years afterwards as Catholics and Protestants alike were burnt and tortured for heresy, depending on the religious proclivities of the monarch at the time. But if she hadn't delivered her demon spawn and had her head struck from her body, who knows, Anne could still be around today, with one bat of her luscious eyelashes bending the actions of the world's male leaders to her wicked will and bringing empires crashing to the ground.