Episode 2

Irrespective of how she arrived there we do know this daughter of one of England’s high flying Whitehall Mandarins became attached to the court of Francis’s wife Claude and spent most of the next ten years, if indeed not longer in and around the French royal Palaces, particularly those in and around the Loire valley.
It was there that Anne Boleyn became a wholly French woman.
Indeed she so thoroughly took to France to her heart as to seem – said the diplomat Lancelot de Carles – ‘a native-born French woman.’
And she seemed to believe .as others did about her, she was something even more – a French Princess.
That persona was certainly the reason for her rise, and her exaggeration of it even more certainly the cause of her fall.
From about the mid-1400s as the war with England came to an end French royalty favoured the Loire Valley as their place of residence.
Indeed, Francis was brought up at his mother’s château at Amboise. 
There they brought in Leonardo da Vinci together with his architectural skills to assist the king with his passion for elaborate building works. 
The great man from Florence lived, underground connecting passage and all, next door at the Chateau du Clo Luce 
When he died, the genius of a man was buried here at Amboise.
Twenty miles north-east of Amboise was and still is the Château de Blois.
The Château is much famed in England, not least for the romantic illusions of Anne Boleyn treading the stairs of the renowned spiral staircase on the courtyard facing wall of the Francis I wing......So, what has that to do with the Château of Blois?
Well, it’s inconceivable that during Anne’s time there, that she did not learn some of its history.
The first record of a building on the site was a castle built by the Counts of Blois in the 800s.
Over the following centuries, it was developed by successive Counts one of which was the Stephen of the Anarchy.
Stephen’s was much inspired to claim the kingdom of England by his wife Maud, Countess de Boulogne, daughter of Count Eustace de Boulogne.
Eustace de Boulogne played a significant role during the conquest, as a consequence, he became one of the wealthiest landowners in England with holdings all over the kingdom, including Kent and even more extensively in Norfolk and Suffolk.
He also had substantial holdings in France.
So, this guy Boulogne was a big shot by any standard, and his daughter inherited his ambitions.
If the union Blois - Boulogne had won the Civil War, and it was a very close-run thing for years, King Stephen’s and Queen Maud’s son, also named Eustace, Count of Boulogne would have become king – and not Henry II
The so-called Plantagenet dynasty would never have existed, and instead, Eustace would have been the first in the Boulogne dynasty of England as a rightful descendant of William the Conqueror.
Be her embellished pedigree true or not, by the time she returned to England she was a wholly Frenchwoman, with the persona of a French princess, to all intents, constructions and purposes, a native French woman, with an ingrained, indelible, almost inherent overriding loyalty to the House of Valois and France.