First, poor Mary. (That was her problem, you know. Mary was always looking for her father in other men, including me. And that shows you how desperate she was!) Secondly, of course, the great Elizabeth, Boleyn's daughter. And wasn't that funny? Satan must be laughing in hell. Old Henry searching for a boy whilst his poor, rejected daughter, Elizabeth, turns out to be the greatest monarch England has ever seen. Mind you, that's not the full truth. Elizabeth was his heir, ostensibly his daughter, only I know the truth… but that's a story for another time and another place.

What is important is to realise that Henry was ruled by his lusts. Oh, he had his passing fancies: Bessie Blount, Lucy Rose, but in the summer of 1522 he was reverting to type. He liked the Howard women: Elizabeth Howard, Anne Boleyn's mother, had already graced his bed. So had Anne's eldest sister, Mary. Now Anne herself, that dark sensuous witch, had returned from France full of coquetry, with her satin dresses, thick lace petticoats, crimson high-heeled shoes, dark sloe eyes, and those beautiful hands which fluttered like the wings of a butterfly.

Henry lusted for her but this time it was different. Anne had been trained at the court of the greatest lecher the world had ever seen, Francis I of France, where seduction, love-making and affairs of the heart were treated with as much attention as matters of state. Anne had seen her elder sister pursued, wooed, seduced – only to be rejected as the 'English mare', a hackney whom anyone could ride. Anne was different. She wanted one thing and one thing only: to be Henry's wife.

Wolsey, lost in his intricate game of human chess against Boleyn, left us alone. So we trotted back to our manor house outside Ipswich.

Now Benjamin was a strange fellow. We had gone to school together. Afterwards he had become a lawyer's clerk and, in doing so, saved me from an undeserved hanging. He was astute, cunning, an expert swordsman, but at times could be infuriatingly naive; not childish but very childlike.