Three prominent historians, Breeze Barrington, Sophie Bacchus-Waterman and Estelle Paranque, will discuss why there is so much modern interest in the Boleyn family and why it is still of lasting interest.

Dr Breeze Barrington will be discussing her book The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court. It resurrects the lives of Maria, later Mary of Modena, and the talented group of women she surrounded herself with at the Restoration courts of Charles II and James II.

Nandini Das will be in conversation with Breeze Barrington, offering a startlingly new, globally resonant vision of England’s past and what it meant to be English. It is a story of a nation in the making – on the cusp of empire – told through the traces of those often written out of it.

Anne Killigrew, the artist who painted ‘Venus Attired by the Graces’ in the Falmouth Art Gallery collection, was a pioneering painter and poet of the Restoration Court. Killigrew was a great favourite of the future queen, Mary of Modena, who was a patron of her work and encouraged her talent. At a time when few women had access to education, Anne Killigrew began a promising career as one of the foremost artists of her generation.

She came from a family steeped in the court. Her uncle, Thomas, was a renowned playwright, a friend of Charles II and manager of the King’s Theatre, and was one of the key figures in licensing women actors. Her father, Henry, was the Protestant almoner to the Catholic James, Duke of York. Her aunt, Elizabeth, had been one of Charles II’s mistresses in exile and mother of one of his many illegitimate children. They were restoration courtiers in the truest sense of the phrase. Their origins, by contrast, were rather murky, for the Killigrews were an ancient Cornish family, who had ruled the south- western shores of Falmouth as pirates for two centuries.

In this talk, Dr Breeze Barrington will discuss the life and legacy, of this brilliant young woman who, though she died tragically young at just 25 during an outbreak of smallpox, achieved great things.