I feel I must be the only person in the country not to have had the Tudors bludgeoned into me at school, read Hilary Mantel’s books or watched the neverending stream of TV adaptations of their tediously complicated affairs.
In case there are any others, in a nutshell, Henry VIII’s loyal sidekick Cardinal Wolsey failed to arrange an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Wolsey fell from grace and in 1529 was charged with high treason, only to die of natural causes before he could be tried and face the inevitable aftermath with the executioner.
In 1537 Henry acquired Esher Palace (next to where Sandown racecourse was laid out in 1875), by which time he had executed Anne Boleyn for failing to give him a male heir.
Hurst Park, on the south side of the Thames almost within sight of Hampton Court, had the Anne Boleyn Stakes from 1946 until the course closed in 1962. In fact, Henry and all six wives had races named after them at Hurst Park. Anne Boleyn’s name has been bandied about in Sandown race names from a two-year-old maiden fillies race (between 1965 and 1985) to a mares’ novices hurdle intermittently between 2008-16.