Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Wiltshire

1480–1538

Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Wiltshire, was the daughter of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and the wife of Thomas Boleyn. She served at the Tudor court and was the mother of Mary, Anne and George Boleyn. Her family’s rise brought extraordinary influence when Anne became Henry VIII’s queen, but it ended in catastrophe with the executions of Anne and George in 1536. Elizabeth died two years later, having withdrawn from much of court life.

Elizabeth appears in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and in many novels about Anne Boleyn, including fictional treatments of the family’s advancement and fall. She is often cast as a distant, ambitious or powerless mother, yet the surviving evidence about her relationships with her children is limited. Historical fiction therefore tends to fill a major documentary silence with interpretations shaped by the novel’s view of the wider Boleyn family.

Alison Weir’s The Grandmother’s Tale is set in the Grandmother's Tale by historian Alison Weir is an e-short and companion piece to Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession, the second spellbinding novel in the Six Tudor Queens series. Alison Weir’s Mary Boleyn places Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Wiltshire within a narrative shaped by family, marriage and personal loyalty, crime, espionage and covert power, and court politics and dynastic power.