Mary Boleyn

• 1. Introduction

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  Mary Boleyn spent most of her life in the shadow of her famous sister, yet her own story cuts just as deep. Born around 1499, most likely at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, she grew up at Hever Castle in Kent, the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, a wealthy diplomat who would later become Earl of Wiltshire. On her mother's side, she was the niece of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk and cousin to Catherine Howard, who would become Henry VIII's fifth wife. The family sat at the very center of Tudor power.

  Mary is remembered chiefly as one of Henry VIII's mistresses, yet the full picture is far stranger. She may have been the mother of two of the King's children. She was rumored to have been the mistress of a French king. And when she finally chose love over ambition, marrying a soldier with no fortune, the consequences were swift and total. Her sister, by then Queen of England, disowned her. She was banished from court and spent the last years of her life in near obscurity.

  What this documentary asks is not just who Mary Boleyn was, but what her life reveals about the world she moved through: a court where a woman's value was inseparable from her family's ambitions, and where the wrong marriage could erase everything.

• 2. Born Into Influence

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  Thomas Boleyn secured his daughter a place at the French court in 1514, when Mary was around fifteen years old. She traveled to Paris as a maid-of-honour to Princess Mary, the King's sister, who was making the journey to marry King Louis XII of France. It was a posting that would follow Mary Boleyn for the rest of her life.

  Her education at Hever Castle had prepared her for exactly this kind of world. She had been taught arithmetic, grammar, history, reading, spelling, and writing alongside her brother George and her sister Anne. She also learned dancing, embroidery, etiquette, household management, music, needlework, and singing. Archery, falconry, riding, and hunting were part of her training too. These were not personal passions; they were the expected accomplishments of a young noblewoman being groomed for court placement.

  The question of whether Mary was older than Anne has long occupied historians. The evidence leans toward Mary being the elder: she was married first, on the 4th of February 1520, and elder daughters traditionally preceded younger ones to the altar. When Anne was created Marchioness of Pembroke in 1532, she was referred to simply as "one of the daughters of Thomas Boleyn," a description that would have been unnecessary had she been the eldest. In 1597, Mary's grandson George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon, made a claim to the earldom of Ormond on the grounds that he was the Boleyns' legitimate heir, a claim that only makes sense if Mary had the senior position in the family line.

• 3. Rumor and the French Court

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  Paris in the mid-1510s was where Mary's reputation first acquired its sharp edges. After Louis XII died shortly after his marriage to Princess Mary, Francis I succeeded him, and it was Francis who allegedly came to know Mary Boleyn rather well. The source for this is a secondhand account from 1536 by Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, the Bishop of Faenza and papal nuncio, who reported that Francis had described Mary as "una grandissima ribalda, infame sopra tutte" - "a very great whore, the most infamous of all."

  That quote, delivered by a foreign diplomat reporting what a king had supposedly said, is the most concrete piece of evidence about Mary's time in France. Historians have debated its reliability ever since. What is certain is that Francis and Mary overlapped at the French court between 1515 and 1519. The nature of any relationship they had is unknown.

  Mary returned to England in 1519 and was appointed a maid-of-honour to Catherine of Aragon, the queen consort of Henry VIII. It was a fresh posting at the English court. Whatever reputation she had brought back from France, it had not yet closed the door on her prospects.

• 4. The King's Mistress

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  Henry VIII attended Mary's wedding on the 4th of February 1520, when she married William Carey, a wealthy and influential courtier of the privy chamber. At some point after that wedding, Mary became the King's mistress. When that began and how long it lasted are not recorded.

  The rumor that Henry fathered one or both of Mary's children has never been confirmed. Her daughter Catherine Carey was born in 1524 and her son Henry Carey on the 4th of March 1526. Henry VIII never acknowledged either as his own, despite having previously acknowledged Henry FitzRoy, his son by Elizabeth Blount. The silence on the Carey children was pointed; Henry was not a man who avoided claiming his illegitimate offspring when it suited him.

  Mary's husband William Carey died during an outbreak of sweating sickness, leaving her with considerable debts. It was Anne, by then the King's focus rather than Mary, who arranged for her nephew Henry Carey to be educated at a Cistercian monastery and secured an annual pension of £100 for her widowed sister. The sisters were not considered close, and they moved in different circles at court, but Anne's intervention in this moment was practical and real.

  Meanwhile, Henry's desire to marry Anne was already reshaping English history. In 1527, while pressing the Pope for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he also requested a dispensation to marry Anne, the sister of his former mistress. The fact that he had slept with Mary created a canonical obstacle: under church law, a man who had relations with a woman could not then marry her sister without special permission.

• 5. Love Over Ambition

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  In October 1532 Mary accompanied Anne to the English Pale of Calais, when Anne traveled with Henry on a state visit to France. Anne was crowned Queen on the 1st of June 1533. On the 7th of September she gave birth to Henry's daughter Elizabeth, who would later become Queen Elizabeth I.

  By 1534, with her sister at the height of her power, Mary made the choice that ended her court life. She secretly married William Stafford, the younger son of an Essex landowner and a soldier with modest income and few prospects. When Mary became pregnant, the marriage could no longer be hidden. Queen Anne was furious. The Boleyn family disowned Mary entirely. Both she and Stafford were banished from court.

  In the desperation that followed, Mary wrote to Thomas Cromwell, Henry's chief adviser, and her words have survived. She acknowledged she might have chosen "a greater man of birth" but not one who loved her as well, nor a more honest man. She told Cromwell she would rather beg her bread with Stafford than be "the greatest queen in Christendom." She believed, she wrote, that Stafford "would not forsake me to be a king."

  Henry appears to have been unmoved. Anne did eventually send Mary a golden cup and some money, but she did not restore Mary to court. That partial gesture was as close as the two sisters came to reconciliation. There is no record that they ever met again after Mary's exile.

• 6. Erasure and Aftermath

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  Mary's life between 1534 and 1543 is difficult to reconstruct. When Anne and George Boleyn were imprisoned in the Tower of London awaiting execution, there is no record that Mary visited either of them. Anne was executed on the 19th of May 1536. Mary's mother died in April 1538 and was buried at St Mary-at-Lambeth Church in the Howard family mausoleum. Her father died in March of the following year and was buried at St Peter's Church in Hever. There is no record of Mary visiting either parent in their final years.

  She died on the 19th or the 30th of July 1543, most likely at Rochford Hall in Essex, of unknown causes. She was in her mid-forties. Her marriage to William Stafford may have produced two additional children: Edward Stafford, born in 1535 and dead by 1545, and Anne Stafford, born around 1536, possibly named in honor of the executed queen.

  Her children from the Carey marriage outlived her considerably and moved in royal circles. Her daughter Catherine Carey served as a maid-of-honour to both Anne of Cleves and Catherine Howard before becoming chief lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth I. Her son Henry Carey was ennobled by Elizabeth shortly after her coronation and made a Knight of the Garter. When he was dying, Elizabeth offered him the earldom of Ormond, the Boleyn family title, but he declined it. One of Catherine Carey's daughters, Lettice Knollys, became the second wife of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, the favourite of Elizabeth I. The thread of Mary's bloodline ran deep through the Elizabethan court, even as Mary herself had been forgotten.

• 7. A Life Reconstructed

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  Philippa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl, published in 2001, brought Mary Boleyn to wide popular attention. It was adapted into a BBC television film in 2003, with Natascha McElhone playing Mary, and then into a theatrical film in 2008, in which Scarlett Johansson took the role. The Showtime series The Tudors, which ran from 2007 to 2010, cast Perdita Weeks as Mary. In the 2015 miniseries Wolf Hall, adapted from Hilary Mantel's novel, Charity Wakefield portrayed her.

  Mary had been the central figure in novels earlier than Gregory's: Karen Harper wrote The Last Boleyn in 1983, and Aileen Armitage wrote Court Cadenza, later republished as The Tudor Sisters, in 1974. The non-fiction record includes Alison Weir's Mary Boleyn: The Mistress of Kings, published in 2011, and Josephine Wilkinson's Mary Boleyn: The True Story of Henry VIII's Mistress, published in 2010.

  What fiction and biography alike keep returning to is the letter Mary wrote to Cromwell, the one document in which her own voice is audible. She chose a man who loved her over a court that used her. That choice cost her everything except, perhaps, the one thing she had asked for.