William Stafford

William Stafford was an English gentleman best known for his marriage to Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn. Born around 1508 into a gentry family, he lacked the wealth and rank expected for a woman connected with the royal court. Mary married him secretly after the death of her first husband, William Carey, and revealed the marriage in 1534 when she was pregnant. Her family strongly disapproved of the unequal match, and the couple were excluded from court patronage.

The marriage appears to have remained stable until Mary’s death in 1543. Stafford later married Dorothy Stafford, a relative of the powerful Stafford family, and became associated with Protestant networks during the reign of Edward VI. Under the Catholic restoration of Mary I, he and his second family joined the English Protestant exile community on the Continent and settled in Geneva. Stafford died there in 1556. His career is therefore known less for high office than for the social consequences of his marriage and his later religious exile.

Alison Weir’s Mary Boleyn examines her service in France, marriages to William Carey and William Stafford, possible relationship with Francis I, and the disputed paternity of her children. William Stafford is treated fictionally in Alison Weir’s The Boleyn Secret.