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A review by deeclancy
Mary Boleyn: The Great and Infamous Whore by Alison Weir
4.0
Having just finished Alison Weir's book The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Ann Boleyn it seemed like a good idea to read this one immediately afterward. Not a huge amount is known about Mary Boleyn, the sister of Ann Boleyn and mistress to Henry VIII prior to his marriage to Ann, but in the hands of somebody who knows a lot about Tudor history and can place the known facts of her life in context, as Weir clearly does, it's still possible to fill a book engagingly.
Much of the book involves speculation, but of an educated nature, and we learn that Mary was considered very much a black sheep within a family whose ambition to achieve favour from the King knew no bounds. Prior to her affair with Henry VIII, she was reputed to have been mistress to the King of France, and many deeply problematic remarks were made about her by French courtiers. Weir maintains, I believe correctly, that these inflammatory comments are more likely to be from people whose advances she rebuffed, as opposed to being an accurate reflection of her personal life at court.
The Boleyn family, it appears, had less of a problem with Mary being a mistress to kings than with the fact of Mary's seeming failure to intertwine her personal relationships with the family penchant for chasing after prestige and material gain. In Tudor times, ambition and relationships were intricately linked for women in society's upper echelons, and indeed for men also.
As Weir points out, it's also impossible to know how consenual these relationships with the two powerful kings were. There was no #MeToo in Tudor times, and it may have been the case that the wisest course of action was to surrender to the wishes of the monarch in personal matters if you wished for a peaceful existence in the long run. This is illustrated in the fact that she was the only surviving child of her parents' marriage to escape execution by Henry VIII. While her sister Ann shone brightly for a while, and was regarded as the more brilliant sister, she seems to have lacked a survival instinct.
Mary was married off by Henry VIII to one of his courtiers, William Carey, with whom Mary had two children: or did she? This question of the paternity of Mary's children is raised and dismissed in Weir's book on Ann Boleyn. However, here, the possibility is seriously raised that, in particular, Mary's daughter, Catherine Carey, was the biological child of Henry VIII. In a serious examination of this theory, she analyses the evidence and it does seem like a possibility, particularly when you see how similar the portraits of Catherine Carey are to those of Queen Elizabeth I. If this were true, it would, intriguingly, mean that many luminaries of today are actually descended from Henry VIII, as Catherine had an enormous brood of children, many of whom survived to adulthood.
Anything one would conclude about the character of Mary Boleyn from this book is purely guess work, based on the little that is known and her two remaining letters. But it does seem likely that her final marriage, to a man lower in station than she, was a love match. Mary married Stafford, knowing that it could make her an outcast at court, and appears to have had some happy years in this union, despite some financial worries; unlike her sister, whose meteric rise was accompanied by an equally dramatic fall from grace. This is speculation, but I like to think that at some point Mary decided that life at the court of Henry VIII was not worth the hassle, and she found a way to live in relative anonymity and peace for a time, as well as ensure her head remained attached to her torso. For this survival instinct, she deserves to be saluted.
Much of the book involves speculation, but of an educated nature, and we learn that Mary was considered very much a black sheep within a family whose ambition to achieve favour from the King knew no bounds. Prior to her affair with Henry VIII, she was reputed to have been mistress to the King of France, and many deeply problematic remarks were made about her by French courtiers. Weir maintains, I believe correctly, that these inflammatory comments are more likely to be from people whose advances she rebuffed, as opposed to being an accurate reflection of her personal life at court.
The Boleyn family, it appears, had less of a problem with Mary being a mistress to kings than with the fact of Mary's seeming failure to intertwine her personal relationships with the family penchant for chasing after prestige and material gain. In Tudor times, ambition and relationships were intricately linked for women in society's upper echelons, and indeed for men also.
As Weir points out, it's also impossible to know how consenual these relationships with the two powerful kings were. There was no #MeToo in Tudor times, and it may have been the case that the wisest course of action was to surrender to the wishes of the monarch in personal matters if you wished for a peaceful existence in the long run. This is illustrated in the fact that she was the only surviving child of her parents' marriage to escape execution by Henry VIII. While her sister Ann shone brightly for a while, and was regarded as the more brilliant sister, she seems to have lacked a survival instinct.
Mary was married off by Henry VIII to one of his courtiers, William Carey, with whom Mary had two children: or did she? This question of the paternity of Mary's children is raised and dismissed in Weir's book on Ann Boleyn. However, here, the possibility is seriously raised that, in particular, Mary's daughter, Catherine Carey, was the biological child of Henry VIII. In a serious examination of this theory, she analyses the evidence and it does seem like a possibility, particularly when you see how similar the portraits of Catherine Carey are to those of Queen Elizabeth I. If this were true, it would, intriguingly, mean that many luminaries of today are actually descended from Henry VIII, as Catherine had an enormous brood of children, many of whom survived to adulthood.
Anything one would conclude about the character of Mary Boleyn from this book is purely guess work, based on the little that is known and her two remaining letters. But it does seem likely that her final marriage, to a man lower in station than she, was a love match. Mary married Stafford, knowing that it could make her an outcast at court, and appears to have had some happy years in this union, despite some financial worries; unlike her sister, whose meteric rise was accompanied by an equally dramatic fall from grace. This is speculation, but I like to think that at some point Mary decided that life at the court of Henry VIII was not worth the hassle, and she found a way to live in relative anonymity and peace for a time, as well as ensure her head remained attached to her torso. For this survival instinct, she deserves to be saluted.