Royal historian Tracy Borman on How To Be A Good Monarch - Worthing date

She will be looking at 1,000 Years of Kings & Queens in this coronation year on a tour which will take in Worthing’s Pavilion Theatre on May 20: “It is exciting and a little bit scary to be doing it but mostly exciting!” she says. “But what inspired me was the fact that this is an incredibly historic royal moment that we're living through, on the eve of the coronation of the new king and this is the first time that most people in this country will have experienced that. I wrote a book about the monarchy originally for the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth but the book was overshadowed by the death of the Queen so I went back to the book and have revisited it and that's when I really started thinking about this moment in our royal history. The fact is that you can learn so much from the past.”

What King Charles III’s reign will bring of course no one knows: “But really, talk about a hard act to follow! She was one of the most successful and certainly the longest reigning sovereign we have had and some people might see challenges because of that but what I would say is that when you look back over the history of the monarchy you realise that the monarchy is extremely resilient and that it has weathered far worse crises than the ones we have seen in more recent times. The key is the resilience and the dedication to tradition and the pageantry. It's about the continuity.” Some aspects of which have been brought back into focus by The Crown in recent years: “I have to say it's one of my guilty pleasures. I'm a big fan of The Crown and I love it. We have heard a lot about the inaccuracies but at the same time I think they've done a lot of social research to get the details very right. I think it's really important that you remember to take it as just a piece of drama. Personally I'm not a purist when it comes to historical drama and I really don't mind if they massage some of the facts but obviously it's as a piece of history it is limited!”

Tracy has also got a book about Ann Boleyn coming out, a queen she believes was completely misunderstood: “She was accused of adultery with five men and also accused of treason but really her only crime was not giving Henry VIII a son. She gave him a daughter Elizabeth and it's one of the greatest ironies that Henry thought that that was a disaster when in fact she went on to be the glory of the Tudor dynasty. I simply don't believe that Ann was guilty on any account.

"She was certainly feisty and she could be proud and haughty and she did have a vindictive streak but you also have to realise that she belonged to an age where female power was not recognised and yet she was someone who did want to have a voice.

" She didn't want to be a meek and mild queen consort. And what is so interesting is that her daughter Elizabeth spent the rest of her life trying to rehabilitate the memory of her mother. Nobody had talked about Ann Boleyn since her execution but when Elizabeth was crowned she honoured her mother by having a life-size model of Ann Boleyn on the route to the coronation.”