Page 32 - All About History - Issue 52-17

Mary Boleyn was pregnant and entirely overshadowed by her dashing, but
mistress both to unfaithful, husband. One brief affair was with the teenaged
Francis I of France
and Henry VIII Mary Boleyn, whom the ungallant Francis would later
describe as a “great whore.” She was hurried home by her
family and, on 4 February 1520, married the courtier William
Carey – a solid, but unspectacular match. Mary also secured
a place with Henry VIII’s wife, Katherine of Aragon, at the
English court. Her sister remained in France, becoming
French in all but birth.
Mary Boleyn arrived at the English court at roughly the
same time Henry VIII was casting an eye around for a new
mistress. The English king was still in his youthful prime
and renowned as the most handsome prince in Europe. He
had also recently fathered a son, Henry Fitzroy, although
not with his Spanish queen, Katherine of Aragon, whose
last pregnancy had ended in 1518 with a stillbirth. Fitzroy’s
mother, Elizabeth Blount, was rewarded with marriage to a
peer, creating a vacancy in the king’s bedchamber.
Mary Boleyn was more conventionally beautiful than
her sister and had been well-schooled by her mother, the
accomplished courtier Elizabeth Howard. It was speculated
that Elizabeth herself had been a mistress of the king’s, but
when Henry VIII was later challenged that he had ‘meddled’
with both Anne Boleyn’s mother and sister, he replied
bashfully “never with the mother.” With Mary, however, it
was a different story.
Unlike Francis I, Henry VIII was discrete in his love affairs,
with little evidence of his relationship with Mary, aside from

age that I am more beholden to you for having sent her to
32 me than you are to me.” Anne quickly learned French, the
language of Margaret’s court, with her first surviving letter “ M ary Boleyn arriv e d at the
– appropriately enough addressed to her father – setting out
the progress of her studies.
Anne made an immediate impression on Margaret, but her E n glish court roughly the sa me
time with the regent was brief. In late 1514 she left Brussels
to serve the young English princess, Mary Tudor, when she
married Louis XII of France. There, Anne joined her sister, time H e nry V III w a s c a sting an eye
who was one of the ladies-in-waiting that accompanied
Queen Mary to her new kingdom. The sisters were among
the few English attendants who were permitted to remain aro u nd fo r a new mistress”
after the wedding.
While marriage to a beautiful teenager initially invigorated
Louis, he was dead within three months. The sisters then
joined the widowed queen in seclusion at Cluny. During that
time, their mistress secretly married Charles Brandon, duke
of Suffolk, the greatest friend
of her brother, Henry VIII, and
returned home in disgrace –
spiriting away some of the
finest French royal jewels
in the process.
This was not to
prove the end of
Anne and Mary
Thomas Boleyn
was ambitious Boleyn’s time
for his younger in France. They
daughter, transferred to the
launching her
career in 1513 household of the
ugly, hunchbacked
Queen Claude, who
was the wife of Louis’
cousin, Francis I. She
was almost permanently