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Home / People / Margaret Butler, Countess of Ormond

Historical person

Margaret Butler, Countess of Ormond

c. 15th century–1542

Margaret Butler was an Anglo-Irish noblewoman, the daughter of Thomas Butler, 7th Earl of Ormond, and Anne Hankford. Her marriage to Sir William Boleyn connected the Boleyn family to the powerful Butler inheritance and strengthened its position among the English landed elite.

Margaret was the mother of Thomas Boleyn and therefore the paternal grandmother of Anne Boleyn, Mary Boleyn and George Boleyn. She died before Anne’s queenship, but her ancestry became important in the Boleyn family’s claims to status and to the disputed Ormond inheritance.

Alison Weir’s The Grandmother’s Tale gives Margaret Butler the narrative voice as she looks back on the Boleyn family after Anne’s execution. From the older woman’s perspective, Hever’s household memories, ambitions and warnings become a way of reconsidering the rise of her granddaughter and the family choices that preceded catastrophe.

Series

Historical novels and book series featuring Margaret Butler, Countess of Ormond (1 series)

Six Tudor Queens in Order

by Alison Weir 21 books 4.2(79,643)

The Six Tudor Queens sequence retells the lives of Henry VIII’s wives through six full-length novels. Twelve companion stories shift attention to relatives, servants, artists and courtiers affected by the same events, while Six Tudor Queens: Writing a New Story explains the project’s historical method. In the Shadow…

All books in this series