The house 'where Anne Boleyn took Henry VIII as her lover' is up for auction at £295,000

The enduring fascination with Anne Boleyn is remarkable. It's 493 years since Henry married his most enigmatic bride — the woman for whom he and Thomas Cromwell engineered the Reformation in England — but I'd happily bet that most people know more (and care more) about Boleyn than almost any queen of the past millennium. The only exceptions — putting aside recent history — are Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I, and given that the latter was Boleyn's daughter, she's intricately bound up in that slice of history too.

People have written volume after volume dissecting why, but at the core is Henry's single-minded callousness in swapping Catherine of Aragon for a younger, more fertile wife in Anne, and moving heaven and earth to do so — almost literally, considering the lasting change to religion in Britain. It's more than that, though: we tend to picture most of Henry's wives as pawns in the great chess game that was Western Europe in the 1530s, but Anne has a reputation as a serious player, bright and clever, using her wiles and proving a match for her husband, only to eventually be undone by machinations beyond her control. How much of this is true, and how much a remnant of Elizabethan propaganda, lionising Elizabeth I's mother, is something else that has filled many volumes.

Let's not academic debate get in the way of the story today, though, for coming up to auction is a home in the very centre of Windsor where Anne Boleyn and the still relatively young Henry VIII are said to have met in secret to begin the affair that would eventually culminate in marriage. Flat 6, Queen Anne's Court is being auctioned off on August 6, with a guide price of £295,000.

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For that, you get a three-bedroom maisonette within a building which the auctioneers note is Grade II-listed, though it seems to be so as part of a general listing for some of the buildings on Peascod Street rather than individually. That does beg the question of the exact truth of the claim, though it's far from the first time that it's been made by agents selling property in this spot.

As ever with Anne and Henry, history, legend and myth seem to go hand-in-hand. And really, would we have it any other way?

Flat 6, Queen Anne's Court, Windsor, is lot 42A in an auction being held across August 6 and 7, 2025. See more details here, and — as ever with auction properties — prospective buyers should be very careful about doing their due diligence before entering a bid