The walls of Lambeth Palace are lined with pictures of indistinguishably distinguished gentlemen but among them is one woman in a stiff Tudor pose who was pointed out to me as Catherine of Aragon, perhaps a contemporaneous portrait and when I was told at once the face came alive and the expression was familiar. Her lower lip is pushed up in a kind of stubborn, bewildered resentment. She is a woman who would like to do right and cannot see what she has done wrong. Yet still her husband is dissatisfied.
The brave and angry set of her mouth is entirely timeless – at least it reminds me of a friend alive today – and you wouldn't want to be married to someone who looked at you with that expression. That one portrait does as much to explain the attraction of Anne Boleyn, and so, perhaps, the foundation of the Church of England, as even the very best histories of the period.
