Mademoiselle Boleyn

Yesterday I finished reading Robin Maxwell's "Mademoiselle Boleyn", a highly fictionalized accout of Anne Boleyn's life in the French court of King Francois and his longsuffering wife, Claude. While very enjoyable, it was a bit of a stretch historically. She has Anne as friends with Leonardo da Vinci, who helps her by giving her advise on how to keep Francois from taking her virginity. Really? Even if she ever met da Vinci, do you honestly think he'd care? Anyway, I love how she made Thomas Boleyn out to be the villian I believe he was, forcing Mary (Anne's older sister) to prostitute herself out first to Francois and later to King Henry VIII (another villian). Some things she changed and I'm not sure why, like having Mary start her affair with Henry after her marriage to William Carey. I think most historians agree she had the affair with the king first, who then married her off to Carey, which is why many doubt the rumor that Mary's first child, a boy named Henry, was actually a royal bastard: by the time she got pregnant, her affair with Henry was over and she was married to Carey. Also, she has Anne refusing to give up her virginity to Henry Percy, who was considered by most historians not only to be the love of her life, but also someone she had a "precontract" with, which meant they were practically married and most likey slept together. I thought it was very funny, at the end of the book they have like a little author interview thing, and Maxwell expresses outrage at some of the liberties other fiction writers have taken with Anne, using a book that I've read as an example. In this other book, the author makes Anne out to be a really nasty person in comparision with her sister, Mary. Anne "adopts" Mary's boy Henry (by then Anne is the queen, so she really doesn't need to do anything legally) to raise at court as her own, and Mary is powerless to stop her. Maxwell is angry that this other writer took such liberties, but ironically, she does the same thing. There is no historical proof that Thomas Boleyn forced his daugher to become not one but two different kings' whore; yet it seems likely, given the time period.
It occurs to me that I know way too much about these people. :-)