The Lady in the Tower
The Fall of Anne Boleyn
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- $89.00
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- $89.00
Descripción editorial
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “well-researched and compulsively readable” (Booklist) biography of Anne Boleyn’s final days, from the renowned author hailed as “the finest historian of English monarchical succession writing” (The Boston Globe)
“It is a testament to Weir’s artfulness and elegance as a writer that The Lady in the Tower remains fresh and suspenseful, even though the reader knows what’s coming.”—The Independent (U.K.)
Nearly five hundred years after her violent death, Anne Boleyn, second wife to Henry VIII, remains one of the world’s most fascinating, controversial, and tragic heroines. Anne’s ascent from private gentlewoman to queen was astonishing, but equally compelling was her shockingly swift downfall. There remains, however, much mystery surrounding the queen’s arrest and the events leading up to it: Were charges against her fabricated because she stood in the way of Henry VIII making a third marriage and siring an heir, or was she the victim of a more complex plot fueled by court politics and deadly rivalry?
Drawing on myriad sources from the Tudor era, The Lady in the Tower explores the motives and intrigues of those who helped to seal the queen’s fate, unraveling the tragic tale of Anne’s fall, from her miscarriage of the son who would have saved her to the final, dramatic scene on the scaffold. What emerges is an extraordinary portrayal of a woman of great courage, tested to the extreme by the terrible plight in which she found herself, a powerful queen whose enemies were bent on utterly destroying her.
Horrifying but captivating, The Lady in the Tower presents the full array of evidence of Anne Boleyn’s guilt—and innocence.
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Rejecting as myth that Henry VIII, desirous of a son and a new queen, asked his principal adviser Thomas Cromwell to find criminal grounds for executing Anne Boleyn, the prolific British historian Weir (The Six Wives of Henry VIII) concludes that Cromwell himself, seeing Anne as a political rival, instigated "one of the most astonishing and brutal coups in English history," skillfully framing her and destroying her faction. Ably weighing the reliability of contemporary sources and theories of other historians, Weir also claims that though perhaps sexually experienced, Anne was technically a virgin before sleeping with Henry. Anne was also, Weir posits, a passionate radical evangelical, with considerable influence over Henry regarding Church reform. Weir wonders if Anne's childbearing history points to her being Rh negative and thus incapable of bearing a second living child. Dissecting four of the most momentous months in world history and providing an eminently judicious, thorough and absorbing popular history, Weir nimbly sifts through a mountain of historical research, allowing readers to come to their own conclusions about Henry's doomed second queen. 15 pages of color photos.
