Mary Boleyn

1499–1543

Mary Boleyn was the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Boleyn and the sister of Anne Boleyn. She spent time at the French court, married William Carey and became a mistress of Henry VIII, although the duration and significance of the relationship are uncertain. After Carey’s death she secretly married William Stafford, a man of lower rank, and was excluded from her family’s favour. She lived away from court during Anne’s fall and died in 1543.

Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl made Mary the protagonist of one of the best-known Tudor novels. She appears in many other fictional accounts of Anne’s rise, usually as sister, rival or moral contrast. Gregory’s romantic and sexual plot is highly imaginative, and the surviving evidence does not support many familiar claims about Mary’s character or her children’s paternity.

Series

Series featuring Mary Boleyn (3 series)

The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels in Order

by Philippa Gregory 16 books 4.4

The Plantagenet and Tudor novels form a chronological sequence of connected but independently readable stories about women near the English throne. They move from the Lancastrian court and the Wars of the Roses through the rise of the Tudors, Henry VIII’s marriages, the mid-Tudor religious crisis and the…

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4.2

The Anne Boleyn Chronicles in Order

by Rozsa Gaston 4 books 4.4

The Anne Boleyn Chronicles reconstruct Anne Boleyn’s formative continental years before her emergence at the English court. Beginning in 1513 in Margaret of Austria’s household at Mechelen, the sequence follows Anne through the courts of Louis XII, Claude of France and Francis I, where language, ceremony, patronage and…

All books in this series